FILM: "Heaven" (Tom Tykwer, 2002)

Following the international success of the Three Colours trilogy, Krzysztof Kieslowski announced his retirement from directing, citing emotional fatigue and a disillusionment with his chosen profession as the deciding factors. However, this self-imposed exile didn’t halt the industrious director’s love-affair with the medium, and it subsequently emerged that Kieslowski and co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz were working on a new trilogy of screenplays entitled Heaven, Hell and Purgatory at the time of his death in 1994.


Having maintained correspondence with the reclusive director following her work on The Double Life of Veronique and Red, actress Irène Jacob has suggested that rather than return to the fray, Kieslowski’s intention was to pass the projects on to three younger film-makers. Piesiewicz eventually expanded the existing 30-page outline into a feature-length script, and the project received international funding before being entrusted to Run Lola Run director Tom Tykwer. At first glance, Tykwer seems an unlikely candidate to bring the material to life – however, delving beneath the hyperactive surface of his previous work suggests that in fact he was the perfect choice. With a structure lifted almost entirely from Kieslowski’s earlier Blind Chance (in which three different scenarios arise from the protagonist’s attempts to catch a train), Run Lola Run’s pounding tempo and flashy, kinetic visuals were seemingly at odds with its thematic concerns, which are pure Kieslowski: Lola’s frantic plight to rescue her lover from harm takes place in a self-contained world governed alternately by fate, chance and its own mechanised logic in which the most ostensibly trivial decisions have life-altering consequences for everyone involved. More pertinently, at its still centre lay a belief in love’s ability to overcome even the most adverse of circumstances, an idea infused throughout Kieslowski’s conceptualisation of Heaven.


True to form, the film focuses on two people whose disparate lives are about to collide through apparently pre-ordained circumstances. Filippo (Giovanni Ribisi) is an idealistic dreamer whose spiritual aspirations are at odds with his austere position in the Consiglièrie. Filippo is the archetypal Kieslowski male, a continuation of the Judge in Red and the mail clerk from A Short Film About Love, characters whose sense of internal calm results in a contentment to just sit and watch a loved one from a distance. When we first meet Filippo he is piloting a helicopter in a simulated training exercise, gliding slowly over green hillsides in a computerised representation of scenes we will see repeated for real later in the film. “How high can I go?” he enquires after failing the test for attempting to exceed an acceptable altitude.


It is then that we are introduced to Philippa (Cate Blanchett), an English widow working as a teacher in Italy. Broken by her repeated pleas for the apprehension of a local drug kingpin (whose trafficking destroyed the lives of her husband and several of her pupils) falling on deaf ears, she decides to take justice into her own hands. Unfortunately, the home-made bomb she plants in his office is inadvertently removed by a cleaning-lady, who is killed along with a father and his two young children. Charged with belonging to a terrorist conspiracy, she is grilled by the unforgiving Consiglièrie, for whom an entranced Filippo acts as translator.


Sensing her underlying compassion, Filippo surrenders his own freedom to aid her escape. Cast in the visage of angels (their identical white T-shirts and shaven heads rendering them both sexless and not of this world), they journey across the Sicilian countryside to what will become their final place of rest in a symbolic finale in which Filippo pilots a stolen helicopter upwards into the sky.


In a telling exchange as they return to the place of her birth, Filippo is revealed to have arrived into the world at the exact moment of Philippa’s first communion, cementing the previously sketchy link between their unlikely kinship. She is liberated by him, both physically and emotionally; in turn, his life is given purpose and meaning when she embraces his love and allows it to redeem her. Both visually and spiritually they are intrinsically linked, often shown completing the other’s visage in compositions which equate them as two halves of the same whole. Indeed, when the couple eventually joins together as two distant figures amalgamating against a glowing sunset – a far cry from the crude sexual encounter between a milkman and his paramour that they uncomfortably witness earlier in the film - it becomes apparent that theirs is not some fleeting association, but a union of souls.


Heaven is a film of overwhelming beauty, an ethereal visual and emotional experience whose looming overhead swoops are instilled with a sense of tranquillity that perfectly mirrors the spiritual plight of its protagonists. Not a single frame is wasted; each moment bursts with luminous rapture, and when the characters finally achieve their freedom the countryside erupts into colour like springtime in full bloom. The film is elegantly scored and redolent with moments of inspired visual trickery, none more so than the stunning representation of Philippa and Filippo’s escape to the provinces, heralded by the breathtaking image of a train emerging from a tunnel towards a rapidly-expanding pinpoint of light. One of the finest films of this decade, Heaven is a fitting tribute to Kieslowski and a remarkable achievement for Tykwer, who manages to honour the spirit of the late director while bringing his vision to life with a tonal unity that clearly demonstrates Tykwer’s own burgeoning maturity as a film-maker.