nyasa wrote:I avoided Heaven for a while, but now that I've seen just about everything available by Kieslowski, I decided to give this one a go.
It's undoubtedly Kieslowskian, right down to the Preisner-esque tinkling piano. There's some gorgeous imagery, and the final shot is one of the all-time great final shots.
But I was left with mixed feelings. It can't really be called Tykwer's film, and it's not Kieslowski's either - so whose is it?
Much of Kieslowski's genius was in the editing of a picture, and if you've read some of the original scripts of his movies you'll be aware of the extent to which he often altered their centre of gravity in the editing room. If he'd lived, and had filmed Heaven himself, it would probably have been a completely different work from the one Tykwer presents us with. And I'm sure he would have steered well clear of the Hollywood-thriller cliches that have crept into Tykwer's film.
The question I need help with: does Heaven deserve to be filed alongside all my other Kieslowski DVDs (they have a shelf to themselves), or should I stick it in with my mainstream DVDs?
I finally got around to seeing this last night when it was premiered on the BBC. I hadn't been avoiding it - I'd actually tried to get the DVD a few years before but instead got a different movie called 'Heaven' from my mail order company! I'm not a confrontational person (and the other Heaven was OK), so I left it at that. I was extremely happy to see the Tykwer film turn up on television though.
I think nyasa brings up a very interesting point about the film which is a more pronounced form of a debate we could have about any film - how much is the director responsible for the content of his film as opposed to the writer? The Heaven situation is complicated by it being a conscious tribute to a deceased filmmaker (the other recent situation coming to mind is A.I.'s Kubrick/Spielberg mix, but there must be others) so there may be conscious aping of certain motifs (e.g. music as nyasa points out), along with the original motifs in the script, but also other elements that seem to come from the new director with his own style.
I have to admit that although I was extremely interested in seeing Heaven, I wasn't
desperate to see it! I really liked Tykwer's Run Lola Run, which I thought was an excellent, fast paced film that doesn't overstretch its idea. I thought all the actors in the film were great too, but I particularly liked Franka Potente and Moritz Bleibtreu as the main couple.
However Run Lola Run seems really to be the anomaly of Tykwer's films, at least in terms of pacing! Which makes it ironic that it was his most successful. A couple of years after Run Lola Run I managed to pick up the Region 1 disc of The Princess and the Warrior, fully aware that it was a much slower film than Lola was just by looking at the over two hour running time compared to Lola's 77 minutes.
Unfortunately I wasn't completely engaged with Princess and the Warrior, mainly because although the acting again was excellent (Franka Potente reunited with her Anatomie co-star Benno Fürmann - this time playing lovers rather than victim and maniac!) and the images amazing (the imagery nyasa describes in Heaven is present in Princess and the Warrior, including another breathtaking final shot), the story felt much too manipulative for me to engage with the characters fully. In a strange way Princess and the Warrior felt a little sub-Kieslowskian in its use of deux ex machina already, so I could understand why Tykwer was attracted to doing Heaven.
While most of Kieslowski's characters are more cyncial and aware of their manipulation by events, it felt to me that Princess and the Warrior's characters were much more naive in their loves (for example Sissi falling for her truck accident saviour), their hopes and their ambitions (e.g. Bodo's brother Walter with his ill-fated attempt to rob the bank he works at). I was about to write that the resolution of Princess and the Warrior felt particularly pat, tying up all the loose ends and solving all the couple's problems (both physical and mental) too easily, but thinking of it as a film that is dealing with young, battered by the events in their lives and naive characters perhaps the film itself was structured in a naive manner to complement that (having said I found the film naive, there were a number of moments that punctured the main characters reverie such as the aforementioned bank robbery and the reaction of Bodo when first confronted by Sissi, but these moments are quickly overcome)
Finally (!) I came to Heaven last night, years after seeing Lola and Princess. I was a little concerned that Heaven might be even more problematic for me than Princess and the Warrior was, since it is a film by a German director with American and Australian lead actors, set in Italy with a Polish script. The collision of these elements worried me.
But I needn't have been. This film is certainly one of the best films I've seen so far this year, and perhaps only rivalled by Birth in the last two!
I have no knowledge of whether this is what actually happened or not, but to make a tentative attempt to answer nyasa's question about how much is Kieslowski and how much is Tykwer I'd suggest there are very noticable elements from both.
It seemed to me that a lot of the visual style including (and I totally agree with nyasa here) the gorgeous final shot, and beautiful totally quiet shilouetted sex scene under a tree on top of a hill as the sun sets could be seen as coming from Tykwer. There were many beautiful shots like that in Princess and the Warrior (I'm thinking back to the sequence where Sissi is about to come into contact with her saviour for the first time since her accident and pushes through a washing line. She approaches him from behind and you see her questing hand reach for his shoulder). The perfect final shot in Heaven of the helicopter ascending until it disappears into the blue sky is matched in Princess and the Warrior by the final long pull back from the house on the edge of the cliff.
Another thing that seems particularly Tykwer-ian(?) is that the three films I've seen so far all involve the difficulties of love between a man and a woman. There's also the chance of changing things either through the literal death and rebirths of Run Lola Run, or the chance to let go of a past lost love and begin again with someone new, someone who appreciates your plight and accepts you in Princess and the Warrior and Heaven.
There is the constant criminal motif through the films, with the heroine of Run Lola Run failing when she attempts to help her unsuited to crime boyfriend by either committing a crime to get the money or committing his crime with him until she finds a way to get the money legally.
The two brothers in Princess and the Warrior are criminals, the hero is a petty thief while his brother works in a bank (and perhaps provides parallels to the security guard in the dead end job opening and closing the door to the vault in Run Lola Run) but is preparing a much bigger and more pre-meditated robbery. The heroine in this film also falls in with the criminals and has to find a way to save her boyfriend from the 'justice' of being caught by the police in order to truly save him. This leads to the interesting sequence when she hides him after the robbery at the mental hospital where she works, only for him to become a patient there!
Heaven does a very interesting thing and reverses these roles, so the man has the position and will to save the condemned woman. Whether this was in the script and Tykwer just kept to it, or whether this was a concious decision is beyond my knowledge, but it is fascinating to consider.
There is also the idea in Heaven that authority that we would normally count on to act correctly and with compassion is too concerned with its own corrupt acts to behave decently. This means that the hero has to take matters into his own hands to ensure fair treatment, even if that means breaking out-moded laws that used to do the same but have now been twisted into persecuting people who would be better served treated in a different manner. This idea is present in both Heaven and in the scenes in Run Lola Run between Lola and her banker father who will not give her the money to save her boyfriend and who we slowly discover in each iteration of the scene before Lola reaches him is having an affair, and then has made his assistant pregnant. We then later find out he isn't her father at all (because he is corrupt and gives the heroine the chance of a better father?)
Interestingly the English dubbed track makes who Lola's
real father is explicit, while the German track leaves things more ambiguous.
So all of these elements feel to me to make Heaven consistent with Tykwer's earlier films. Where I feel the Kieslowski touch most apparently is in the beautiful ambiguity of actions. Where Princess and the Warrior, and even Run Lola Run felt like they bludgeoned me at certain points with discussions of love, regret and duty which stopped the films in their tracks (for example the sequences of Lola and Manni in bed that cap each iteration of Run Lola Run, even though they are beautifully done; or the scene between Sissi and Walter when she returns to the brother's house for the first time after her initial rejection), and asks characters to speak in terms and about subjects that it feels that they wouldn't necessarily have talked about in the same manner if it wasn't necessary to the plot. The characters might be thinking such things (and this is what makes the 'red bedroom' sequences work for me in Run Lola Run), but I can't escape the feeling that they are having their words imposed on them by the writer, rather than coming by them in their own fashion as fully rounded characters.
I found this flaw to be completely absent in Heaven and it is what makes me attribute this more to the Kieslowski and Piesiewicz script. I was particularly impressed by the handling of the deaths of the four innocent people by the bomb Phillipa planted. I was expecting, and indeed the film began that way, to see her genuine reaction to killing innocent people to be the thing that swayed Filippo into falling in love and helping her. Ordinarily, once that device had served its purpose of getting the hero, and indeed the audience, to feel sympathy for the woman, it would be dropped - it would have fulfilled its manipulative purpose.
Also the 'thriller' element of the film is climaxed very early, with the death of the 'evil' character handled in a relatively perfunctory and straightforward manner. Then the film becomes an 'on the run' picture, but Philipa has already said to Filippo that the only reason she escaped was to kill the man she had previously failed to kill. Now she has completed her mission, she is aimless and Filippo, as her saviour, is in the driving seat, pushing her along, much as Sissi did to Bodo after his brother's death in Princess and the Warrior, and Lola dragging either herself or Manni back to life at the end of each iteration in Run Lola Run.
It is the delicacy of the characterisation that makes Heaven stand out for me over the (intentional?) naivete of Princess and the Warrior. The sequence where Philipa shows she will always be haunted by those she wrongly killed brings back up the idea that she is punishing herself in a much deeper and meaningful way for their deaths than the corrupt police officers, only interested in covering up their complicity in the drug trade by turning her into a terrorist agent, were going to do.
The beautiful scene in the church between Cate Blanchett and Giovanni Ribisi was when I realised I was watching an amazing, heartbreaking film:
"I've done a lot of damage and some really stupid...stupid things. I've lied to my mother and to my sister many, many times. I was unfaithful to my husband once and I didn't do everything I could to save him. Anyway, maybe it's not possible to do...everything.
Four people died because of me and I can't live with that. I'll never be able to. I shot a defenceless person, which you know. But what you don't know is...I've ceased to believe."
"Believe in what?"
"In sense. In justice. In life."
"I love you."
"I know, it's....just...It's just that I want the end to come."
It is acted so perfectly I'm tearing up a bit just transcribing it, and I think this delicate way of articulating deep feelings, and her reaction to his, obvious from when he first began to help her, affection combined with her self-hatred and guilt for her actions leads her to acknowledge but not reciprocate his statement. Not yet, at least!
Combined with the final, literally transcendent, image I have to say I was incredibly impressed with this film. I don't know if I could answer nyasa's question about whether to put it on his Kieslowski or Tykwer shelf, it seems to be a perfect marriage of both.
I'll have to try to get the DVD of Danis Tanovich's Hell now!