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copyright ©1999-2003
DigsMagazine.com.
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Plot synopsis
Philippa is a British citizen living in Italy, an English teacher who
decides she's fed up with doing the good, law-abiding thing when her
repeated attempts at warning the authorities about a local drug kingpin
are continually ignored. She's seen her husband as well as several of
her students killed by the very drugs this man has been dealing, and
she's frustrated, angry and determined to get justice in whatever way
she can. One afternoon, she walks into the shiny skyscraper office
building where the drug dealer works, makes her way calmly up the glass
elevator with a bomb tucked away in her bag. It's a perfect plan:
Philippa distracts the secretary, slips the bomb into the man's office
wastebasket, then walks away. Unfortunately, the plan misfires, and
Philippa ends up killing four innocent people while the target of her
vengeance survives unscathed. When the police arrive to haul her away,
she's hardly surprised — until at the interrogation, she learns that the
drug dealer is alive and well, and that instead, she's now responsible
for the murder of a father, his two young children, and a cleaning
woman. Horrified, devastated, appalled, and disappointed, Philippa
faints. A young police officer named Filippo, serving as official
English translator, rushes to her side. In the moment that she opens her
eyes, Filippo, still holding Philippa's hand, has an epiphany: he's in
love with this woman. Filippo offers to help Philippa break out of jail,
although she only agrees on one condition: that she's not interesting in
escaping her moral responsibility for her crimes, but merely in
finishing the job of killing off the drug dealer.
Review
There
are movies I love because they have great characters, and movies I enjoy
because they have a gripping plot. Heaven isn’t an example of
either of these. I don’t come away from the film feeling like Filippo
and Philippa are my new best friends; the pacing’s so molasses-slow
that Heaven is surely one of the least adventure-packed
lovers-on-the-lam stories ever committed to film. I’m not sure I even
entirely understand Heaven: why Filippo falls in love and
subsumes himself in Philippa; why the two lovers-on-the-run shave their
heads to look like either twin Hare Krishnas, or aliens, certainly
neither one a particularly inconspicuous
I’m-hiding-from-the-authorities disguise; why the film ends in the
curious way it does. I mean, I’m a former art major, so I can b.s.
about fate and duality and spiritual journeys as well as the next
wannabe intellectual, but when it comes down to it, the movie doesn’t
really make much sense in the way of resembling anything close to how
things generally work in the real world. But the thing about Heaven
is that there’s something about it that sucks me in despite all this.
It’s just so, so beautiful
—
and not just to look at either,
although the visuals are gorgeous and meditative and almost unbearably
perfectly pristine, hardly surprising since the movie’s based on a
Kieslowski (Blue/White/Red trilogy) screenplay that the director
never got a chance to shoot before he passed away. What Tykwer brings to
the film is a fantastic energy that crackles and tingles beneath all
that lovely surface
—
this is a movie you really feel as you much as
you see: it gets under your skin, sweeps you up in a mood, an ambience,
a magical spell. In the end, you feel the ideas that the film is trying
to get across
—
love and forgiveness, heaven
—
more than you
rationally understand any of these things. Like love itself, what’s
amazing and mesmerizing about Heaven isn’t so much about the
head, but the heart. —reviewed
by Yee-Fan Sun
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