Heaven
Directed by Tom Tykwer
Miramax Films, 96 minutes
Turin is famous for being the site of Nietzsche’s nervous breakdown. It was in the central piazza of that part of Italy that the philosopher threw himself on a horse being viciously beaten by its owner, pleading for mercy on behalf of the animal. The irony involved in a man whose work viewed sympathy and pity as hindrances to his moral and intellectual advancement being undone by an uncontrollable outpouring of those very emotions has not been lost on subsequent commentators. I don’t know if the makers of Heaven were aware of this fact about Nietzsche, but it’s certainly interesting that they chose to set the movie—which concerns the same subject of which the philosopher was so wary, sympathy—in the very same city. It seems the like the sort of unnoted but nevertheless important incidental fact that the late Krzysztof Kieslowski—one of the movie’s two credited screenwriters, along with Krzysztof Piesiewicz—would consider important.
Much like Nietzsche, Heaven finds pity in the most unlikely of places at the most unlikely of times. We first see the movie’s lead character, played by Cate Blanchett, assembling a bomb in her apartment. We follow her through the city streets as she walks into a high-rise office building. We watch her place the bomb in a garbage can inside the office of an electronics executive. Then, before the bomb detonates, we watch her phone up to the office to clear out the executive’s secretary. We see a janitor empty the executive’s garbage can, and walk onto an elevator where a father and his two young daughters are already aboard. The explosion, mercifully, takes place off-screen. The next thing we see is Blanchett’s bomber being arrested by the carabinieri. She had confessed to the bombing—and given her name—in a phone call to the police shortly after leaving the building. It appears that the electronics executive is a drug kingpin, and, frustrated in her efforts to prompt a police investigation, Blanchett saw such a desperate action as her only option.
She does not learn of the bomb’s actual affects until her interrogation. We watch in close-up as the investigators tell her that she took the life of two young girls, their father, and the building’s janitor. Disbelief, self-loathing, and remorse all appear in her face. She breaks down and faints. It’s the sort of reaction to a nightmarish scenario with which a good many of us—perhaps against our better judgment—could sympathize. Giovanni Ribisi’s young carabinieri, who acts as her translator during the interrogations, goes well beyond the bounds of our normal sympathy for a person in such a predicament. After she faints, he revives her, and when he takes her hand as she lies sprawled on the floor he falls hopelessly, desperately in love.
That last development is certainly problematic. Some audience members—I dare say even a majority—may not accept it. It’s difficult, especially in light of recent events, to accept the notion of anyone falling in love with someone whose murderous acts, however unintentionally, caused the deaths of four innocent people. Other audience members may look upon this as the example par excellence of the notion that we cannot choose who we love. I think the filmmakers intended to inspire the second reaction; it certainly makes the rest of the movie more plausible. If we believe that love make fools of us all, it becomes easier to believe that love can make co-conspirators of us all as well. Suddenly, the carabinieri’s decision to help the object of his affection escape from police custody and flee across the Tuscan countryside becomes more understandable.
Heaven was directed by Tom Tykwer, the German filmmaker best known for Run Lola Run. He’s an unlikely collaborator for Kieslowski; I certainly wouldn’t have guessed that the man who stretched a fifteen-minute action sequence into a ninety-minute movie could share a vision with the man who stretched a violation of each of the Ten Commandments into a ten-hour movie. Heaven affords Tykwer two chances to flex his muscles: both the opening bombing and the escape plan are elaborate set-pieces that require the precise cross-cutting and pacing of someone with Tykwer’s unique talents. The remainder of the movie, however, is a metaphysical jumble, in which themes of love and sacrifice are discussed at great—and oblique—lengths. It’s easy to sense that the director was not exactly sure of himself in these moments.
Indeed, as the film moves into the countryside, the weight of the ponderous screenplay becomes downright unbearable. The motives of our two protagonists are painted in only the broadest strokes. Blanchett’s character planted her bomb in an effort to avenge her husband’s overdose-induced death and to protect the youth of Turin from predatory drug dealers. Our young police officer is, of course, driven by a blinding fit of adolescent love. If the screenwriters refused to interrupt their representation of the mysterious forces that draw us all together with any basic exposition about our relevant psychological states, the director was equally unwilling to enlighten us. As the movie drags on, he lets the symbolism take over. The two protagonists, already connected by their homophonic names (Philippa and Filippo) and shared birthday, begin to don the same costumes and, after having their heads shaved, become indistinguishable from afar. The scenery likewise becomes so ethereal that I’m impressed that the emulsion on the film succeeding in committing it to posterity.
Heaven doesn’t ultimately work. I could criticize the naiveté of its central premise, or I could criticize its formless direction. The movie seems to be less than the sum of these criticisms, however. It’s hard to peg a moving target for naiveté, just as it’s hard to criticize a director who doesn’t seem to know what sort of movie he’s making. There is, quite simply, little for an audience to get at in Heaven. Pauline Kael criticized Days of Heaven for being “like an empty Christmas tree; you can hang all your dumb metaphors on it.” That criticism bears repeating here, where the central idea abandons the honest requirements of love and sympathy, and celebrates instead the destructive behavior that dramatic expressions of those emotions causes. I don’t know if its due to something in the ether around Turin, but watching Heaven caused me to have the same bewildered reaction that I’m sure a reader of Nietzsche must have felt watching him break down over a century ago. The display just doesn’t make sense, given what else we know.
