PREVIEW
HEAVEN
Starring Cate Blanchett and Giovanni Ribisi.
Directed by Tom Tykwer
Opens Friday, November 29
Uptown Screen
When Tom Tykwer was asked to direct the last completed screenplay by the Polish team behind such milestones in world cinema as The Decalogue, The Double Life of Veronique and the Three Colours trilogy, he did the only rational thing. He said no.
"I thought, ‘I’m not going to mess up with the legacy of one of the godfathers of art film!’" says Tykwer of the script by late director Krzysztof Kieslowski and his writing partner Krzysztof Piesiewicz. "Then I took it and read it and had an amazing experience. Something that I was just reading out of curiosity very quickly turned into something that felt like my own material."
The film that Tykwer created from the script has turned out to be more than a tribute to the director who originated the project. Instead, Heaven – the story of a reluctant terrorist (Cate Blanchett) and the young Italian cop (Giovanni Ribisi) who falls for her – seems like a fruitful collaboration between two kindred filmmakers.
Though the young German director is best known for the hyperkinetic Run Lola Run, Tykwer’s other features – especially Lola’s intriguing, if half-baked, follow-up, The Princess and the Warrior (2000) – employ a more languorous, eminently Kieslowskian pace. Likewise, Heaven involves a number of themes Tykwer has explored before.
"(The script) had so many elements I like," he says. "Subjects like unconditional love, redemption and the idea of a person being able to save someone else’s soul. Then there’s my neverending relationship with the intertwining of fate and coincidence.
"Still," he adds, "it seemed like a new step for me, something I’d never done before. I felt like this is the script that I wanted to write next but was never able to."
Tykwer realized he was not just the right person to do it, but probably the only person. "That, of course, is a pathetic and pretentious idea," he admits, "but it’s something you have to believe in order to be motivated to completely sacrifice two years of your life to it. I mean, making a film really fucks up your social existence, so it should be something worth it."
While Heaven sometimes relies too heavily on its celestial-minded symbolism, it’s still emotionally affecting and visually austere (cinematographer Frank Griebe shoots the actors as if they were Renaissance sculptures). The ever luminous Blanchett plays Philippa, a teacher who inadvertently kills four innocent people in an attempt to bomb the office of a drug kingpin in Turin. She is arrested by the police, who have covered up their own connections to her target. When she insists on answering questions from her Italian interrogators in English, she is assigned a young member of the Carabinieri, Filippo (Giovanni Ribisi), as her translator. Touched by her expressions of remorse, the shy, smitten officer aids in her escape and both the characters and the film head into less conventional territory.
"I always try to make films where you have both," says Tykwer. "First, there’s the excitement part, the thrilling set-up – when I go to the cinema, I want to be excited and involved on a familiar path, but I love it when films then take off or guide you through doors that you haven’t seen before.
"Heaven was one of those films where I thought that this can actually happen very fluidly. We start off with something that is completely familiar, with all the attributes of the policier – the interrogation, the policeman who falls in love – but on the other hand, at a pretty early stage we were able to make clear that it won’t stay like that."
The fact that the action in Heaven is often more metaphorical than literal softens the edges of its subject matter, which became potentially controversial after the events of September 11, 2001. Though his film contains the sympathetic portrayal of a character who is arguably a terrorist, Tykwer says the real-life events didn’t influence its nature.
"Remember, this was all shot before September 11," he says. "Even that scene with the bomb was already edited the way it is in the finished film. To me, it was not really an issue because the film is not about terrorism at all. I don’t think it really relates to it very much apart from the fact that there’s a moral discussion in the film and a moral dilemma about the consequences of taking justice into your own hands.
"The film is more about redemption. It offers a concept for it and offers a concept of love that I very much appreciate and tried to advertise."
Ultimately, the most important element that Heaven shares with Kieslowski’s films is its impassioned humanism. While Tykwer’s adaptation is decidedly spiritual, it isn’t tethered by dogma.
"Of course there’s a spiritual part to the film," he says, "but it’s not especially religious to me. It’s basically the concept that love can help us find our true perspectives and our true meanings. This is not about God being somewhere else, but in ourselves, and what a gift that is." |
