Heaven for a Terrorist

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.

Tender from guilt, she awakens to brown-eyed grace. A young police officer with a name similar to the beautiful lawbreaker’s, Filippo (Giovanni Ribisi), who has been translating the interrogation, is mesmerized by Philippa. He falls in love with her, and the two escape together. (The talented Ribisi is puzzlingly tame and impassive in this role.) On the way out of the Carabinieri headquarters, Filippo and Philippa complete her original mission: this time, the narcotics trader ends up dead. Soon they are on the lam, giving into a wild abandon that recalls the couple in the 1999 French picture, Lovers on the Bridge.

So much for the machinery of the thriller, which gives the film its taut structure. In Heaven, the real action takes place in the ether. Viewers who expect the movie to be realistic—even in the very elastic sense of “realism” that we bring to the multiplex—will find it hard to get past the thick coincidences: the all-too-easy escape from detention, salvations that come at just the right time, Filippo’s birth on Philippa’s day of First Communion, the fugitives’ names. Or this: Toward the end of the movie, when Philippa and Filippo shave their heads, wear identical white t-shirts and denim jeans, they begin to look andro-gynous and, well, impractical. Look merely at their bodies, and you’ll see two runaways unnecessarily attracting attention to themselves. But look past their physicality, and you’ll see two otherworldly creatures—souls readying themselves for heaven.

Don’t, of course, count on a Kieslowski movie to give you a reliable lesson in Christian theology. While Piesiewicz is a churchgoing Catholic, Kieslowski was hesitant to explicitly call himself a Christian. How much of the theological insouciance of their films is intentional, how much simple ignorance or deference to a secular audience, is often hard to say. One gets the impression that Piesiewicz and Kieslowski saw the Garden of Eden as a last stop before heaven, or perhaps paradise and heaven were synonymous in their minds. But Kieslowski believed in God strongly enough to tenaciously explore the implications of his existence.

Heaven poses a series of questions. In a corrupt society, are we allowed to take justice into our own hands? Is it permissible to fight evil with evil? (Specifically: Is terrorism ever justified?) Can hate and love coexist in one heart? Does love really conquer all? Can we return to primordial innocence? Under the skin of two paramours on the run are the biblical archetypes of Adam and Eve, who probably asked some of the same questions. Ribisi doesn’t show this, so we have to guess that Filippo falls in love with Philippa because he sees that she is somehow, if only in her destination, like him—the similarity that will become obvious as they become alike in appearance. Like Adam and Eve, the two try to become like God. And like the first couple, they have to face their sin.

Kieslowski and Piesiewicz’s movies consistently proclaim that only God has the right to take a man’s life (consider Decalogue‘s gruesome part 5—You Shall Not Kill—for example). Is Heaven, in nudging us to side with the killer, a revision of this philosophy? Piesiewicz, an ex-attorney whose cases inspired several of the duo’s works, has likely felt the desire to avenge a killing. His mother was brutally murdered by house invaders several years ago. (Strange twists of fate don’t happen only in movies: he

had been planning to visit his mother just before the crime, but ended up not going.) And yet, now a senator, Piesiewicz told Polish TV: “As long as I work publicly, I will be against any of us having the right to decide and execute the law on our own.”

The oppressive guilt Philippa and Filippo feel is mirrored in tight camera work and Turin’s architecture—the constraining, dizzying labyrinth of streets. When they escape the city’s confines, can you guess where they go? Italy’s travel agents and the Olive Garden’s chefs have been right all along: Paradise can be found only in Tuscany! Its open spaces and gentle slopes, panned smoothly and generously, suggest a restoration of innocence. So do the camera’s more outward and upward zooms.

“The whole picture is a slow turning of the camera toward heaven,” Tykwer explained. “In the beginning Cate Blanchett is closed in herself, she walks with her head hung down, then she opens up, she lifts her head, till the last scene, when she’s looking straight at heaven.” Before that breathtaking final scene is a shot so paradisiacal that it’s almost kitschy. Filippo and Philippa’s appetite for heaven is whet on a hill under a sprawling tree as they become one and are, the suggestion is, purged by love.

I don’t usually empathize with evildoing protagonists, but it’s easy—and perhaps right?—to do that with Philippa. Her remorse and acceptance of the impending judgment are clear. She confesses her sins in a country church where cherub-faced Filippo seems to be filling in for God. “I’ve ceased to believe,” she whispers. “In sense, in justice, in life.” And like the God of perfect love, Filippo heals her with complete acceptance. “I love you,” he says, and she is absolved. From the place of forgiveness, the divine magnet pulls them upward, and we soon solve the riddle from the beginning of the movie.

Given the sky’s photogenic endlessness, on display in the brilliant final scene, it makes sense that the film’s original title, Paradise, was changed. And, who knows, perhaps in the process of the movie’s creation, its makers, along with Filippo and Philippa, became aware of the difference between heaven and paradise. Asked about the title change, Piesiewicz was evasive, answering instead a different, more important question: “Why Heaven? Because if it exists, Kieslowski is surely there right now.” As Filippo and Philippa find out, a return to Eden is fleeting at best. But heaven—with its glory and a redeemed awareness of suffering and sin—is a possibility for all.

Agnieszka Tennant is an associate editor of Christianity Today.