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Man is soul clothed in a body," said Krzysztof Piesiewicz, the coauthor of the screenplay for the movie Heaven, at a news conference following the Polish premiere of the film. "You cannot separate the two. You cannot touch the inside, but you have to look at it."
In the Nineties, the films of the late Krzysztof Kieslowski, on which he collaborated with Piesiewicz, offered just such a glimpse of the human soul. The trilogy Three Colors: Blue, White, Red and especially the Decalogue series (ten understated films loosely based on the Ten Commandments) gave us enough of the outside to reveal the silhouette of the inside. So does Heaven—but only if you watch it with Piesiewicz's metaphysical realism in mind.
The $16 million Miramax/X-Filme production directed by German filmmaker Tom Tykwer begins like a classic action movie. First, as if part of a different picture, a computer game foreshadows the astounding ending. Then the cliffhanger proper begins: A young woman slyly places a time bomb in a trash can inside a Turin skyscraper. She leaves the building, and soon we see a janitor emptying the basket and taking the trash with her. She pushes her trash collection onto an outside elevator, with a man and his two daughters on board. The closing of the doors is followed by the sound of an explosion—leaving us to imagine the horror within.
This suspenseful energy—stressed by the German director with a beautiful, sparse piano score he cowrote with Arvo Pärt—is a Tykwer trademark but not a quality associated with the introspective Kieslowski. And as with another recent case of a director carrying out the vision of one who had died—Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick's A.I.—critics set out to compare and contrast the two directors involved in Heaven. But the question is not, as some reviewers assumed, whether Kieslowski's directing would have resulted in a different movie. Of course it would—but he never planned to direct Heaven, which he and Piesiewicz completed several months before Kieslowski's sudden death in 1996. On the contrary: from the outset, Piesiewicz and Kieslowski wrote the script for "a young, European director." Stories for the remaining parts of the trilogy, Hell and Purgatory, are already written, and will be entrusted to other young filmmakers. (One of the films is about "journalists who are trying to be successful at all cost" and the other about pedophilia scarring a family.)
Would Kieslowski have picked Tykwer? Very likely. When Piesiewicz met the director of Run, Lola, Run for the first time, he knew that he was the right person for Heaven. "Tykwer instantly showed a perfect understanding of the screenplay, and, judging by the flood of notes on his copy, I realized that he not only read it but lived it."
The German director was faithful to the story but never tried to imitate Kieslowski in making this movie. He didn't have to. Three pages into the reading of the 30-page treatment, Tykwer, in his own words, "forgot whose it was." Then it became his. His previous movies, The Princess and the Warrior (2000) and Run, Lola, Run (1999), show love in the teeth of ill fate. So too does Heaven—but the stakes are higher.
When the young bomber, an English schoolteacher named Philippa—played flawlessly by Cate Blanchett—is arrested, she confesses to a plot to kill an influential drug baron. She planted the bomb in his executive suite because narcotics he brought to Turin took too many lives—her own husband and some of her students overdosed—and the many letters she wrote to the police had gone unanswered. When the Carabinieri tell Philippa that she killed not the drug trader but four unintended victims, Blanchett's face morphs from confidence to despair, from piety to remorse; she weeps and blacks out.
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