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Film Description
This haunting psychological drama based on a screenplay co-written by Krzysztof Kieslowski, Heaven is a powerful, moving tale of love, retribution and redemption and was the debut feature for German filmmaker Tom Tykwer.
Philippa (Cate Blanchett), a British teacher living in Turin, Italy, has watched helplessly as her husband and friends have fallen victim to drug overdoses. To compound her desperation, the police - who are complicit in the actions of Turin's biggest drug dealer - have completely ignored Philippa's repeated offers of information. So, with the unexpected help of a sympathetic police officer (Giovanni Ribisi), Philippa decides she has nothing to lose by taking divine justice into her own hands...
As with every other unconventional film reviewed, the audience is always bitterly divided. However, having watched this German director in Run Lola Run and also having... more >
As with every other unconventional film reviewed, the audience is always bitterly divided. However, having watched this German director in Run Lola Run and also having watched the acclaimed Three Colours Trilogy by Kieslowski (who wrote the script for this but never got to shoot it before dying), together with being born Asian, having grown up solely with indelible American influence through the media and now living in Europe, I should comfortably claim that I have enough cultural literacy to address the issue at hand. It seems to me that while it's easy to accuse the average American of never being able to view the world in any other way than his own, it's also equally easy to say that the average European will always be inclined to pass art-house productions of mediocrity as masterpieces.
The ultimate question becomes "Can there actually be films which can never be truly and objectively judged on its cinematographical merits but always on intrinsic audience bias?" One yells boring, slow, over-elaborate, pseudo-art Emperor's-New-Clothes gobbledegook. The other retorts -hollow, commercial, run-of-the-mill, populist mindless fanfare. Which rings true?
"Heaven" brings the two competing factions into acute conflict. The film just oozed class with every still a potential reproduction as a painting. Cinematic splendour aplenty, the beauty of the film is undeniable - yet as each sequence got more and more stylish and the dialogue got more and more sparse and symbolic, I began to think hard about whether any of this elaborate subtext is necessary at all. The DVD extras mentioned how this film took TEN months to edit - I'm just wondering what editing was done in the first place!
In an opening five-minute showcase of hypnotic flair, Philippa the vigilante plants a bomb in the office of a corrupt man only to kill four other innocents instead. The Turin carabinieri drag her to prison and frame her as a terrorist to protect the culprit in some conspiracy scheme. Filippo the interrogation interpreter is taken in by her and together they plan a daring escape which puts everything that he has in jeopardy.
Cate Blanchett couldn't put a foot wrong in this role because she has that kind of angry-but-fragile face so necessarily demanded in actresses playing protagonist parts. Giovanni Ribisi (Phoebe's idiotic brother in Friends!) did a better job as her opposite but both their accents are glaringly unnatural according to my Italian housemates whom I watched it with. Not that a non-native speaker like me could ever tell them apart from the Mario brothers or anyone else but one thing which did come to mind is my suspicion that the two were cast simply because their countenance and demeanour were already half the part. Usually, texture over talent is a bad option but it seemed to work well with the flow of the story. I guess over-individualisation would detract from the intended feel of the film.
Although I confess that I'm a sucker for artsy films, this one just managed to lose my patience. Returning to the American-European divide, to answer the question on just when enough is enough with regards to this film, I found it profoundly revealed when Melchiorre my Sicilian mate, who's quite the film connoiseur himself, exclaimed loudly midway through the DVD "Please someone shoot them, or someone do something, or something happen to something!". Indeed the director must've ran out of breath after making the pacey Run Lola Run and shot this with Mr. Snail and Ms. Sloth in mind. They're going to give this two thumbs up as soon as they take their adrenaline shot.
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