“Heaven” - Tom Tykwer (2002)

Heaven (2002) is a romantic thriller that fascinatingly features the combined virtues of its two talented creators, Tom Tykwer and Krzysztof Kieslowski.  Film director Tykwer presents this tale with the visually kinetic flare one would expect on the basis of his earlier work (Winter Sleepers (1997), and Run Lola, Run (1998)). But it is Kieslowski’s story/screenplay (co-written with his usual coauthor, Krzysztof Piesiewicz) that makes this film stand out from other thrillers and raises it to another level.  Kieslowski had intended this to be the first part of a trilogy, whose other two parts were to be Hell and Purgatory, but his death in 1996 prevented him from completing that project.

On the surface, the story may seem to be simple and outlandish. A woman seeking revenge for  her husband’s death by drug overdose attempts to assassinate the drug kingpin behind her husband’s addiction.  However, her assassination attempt goes awry and leads to the deaths of four innocent people instead of her intended victim.   She is immediately arrested and confesses to her crime.  But while she is testifying to the police in custody, a low-level police officer becomes enamored of the woman and tries to whisk her away to safety.  Most of the film is devoted to his lone efforts, in the face of impossible odds, to somehow rescue this women from the punishment  that seems to be inescapable. 

Just looking at the plot on that level, the story may seem preposterous and morally questionable.  Why should we be interested in helping a confessed murderer escape facing the consequences of her act?  Indeed film critic Roger Ebert questioned the morality of the story for this reason [1].  But if you are familiar with Kieslowski, you know that he sees human engagement in all its inscrutable and multifaceted complexity.  In his acclaimed ten-part television series, Dekalog (1989), Kieslowski had earlier explored the range of the Bible’s Ten Commandments and the extent to which it is ultimately impossible to formulate a fully structured logical framework for moral and ethical behaviour [2].  What is invariably needed to complete the picture is an injection of the mysterious powers of love and compassion. This territory is explored further here in Heaven’s fantasy-tinged theatrics.

In fact there are several themes explored in Heaven.  Morality is one of them, but it is overshadowed by two other themes:

• the nature of love and compassion
• the contingent nature of existence: the degree to which chance governs our existence and the consequent extent to which we are to be held responsible.

At the outset of the film, an Italian police officer, later identified as Filippo (played by Giovanni Ribisi), is being given helicopter pilot training by means of a flight simulator.  At the end of the training session Filippo elevates the simulated helicopter upwards indefinitely, at which his instructor remarks, “in a real helicopter you can’t just keep flying higher.”  Filippo then asks, “how high can I fly?”  Indeed, that is the question concerning contingency that will be put to the test.

Then the film turns to the assassin, Philippa (Cate Blanchett), and her attempt to set a time bomb in a high-rise office building that is intended to kill a corporate executive, Mr.Vendice,  who she knows is a  clandestine drug overlord.  It is all carefully planned; but happenstance intervenes, and the bomb is accidentally moved so that when it detonates, it kills four innocent people and not Mr. Vendice. 

Philippa had been trying to get the Carabinieri, the Italian national police, to take action against Mr. Vendice and had identified herself to the police force on numerous occasions.  What she did not know was that the police had corrupt elements who were in on Vendice’s drug trade. These people had suppressed her revelations and when the bomb wet off, they knew who was responsible and immediately had Philippa arrested.  It is only at this point, eleven minutes into the film that the film titles appear.

Although Philippa is clearly guilty of the killing, she is brought to the prosecutor at the Carabinieri headquarters to make her own statement, and she uses the opportunity to reveal, once again, what she knows about Mr. Vendice.  Since Philippa is English (she works in Italy as an English teacher), she wants to testify in English.  So Filippo, a young police clerk in attendance who knows English, is recruited to be her translator. What none of them realize is that also in attendance at her testimony is Major Pini (Mattia Sbragia), who is in on the drug corruption and wants to see Philippa and her “evidence” eradicated.

While testifying to the prosecutor, Philippa is overcome with horror of her crime and faints to the floor.  Filippo bends down to attend to her, and when he looks into her eyes and holds her hand, he falls in love with her.  Philippa is unaware of this event, but from here on, Filippo is quietly but unreservedly in love.

Filippo is now faced with an apparently hopeless task: to save his beloved who is imprisoned  for a confessed heinous crime.  The rest of the film covers his efforts, which are divided up into five “operations” – we can call them ops, stratagems, gambits, capers, maneuvers, whatever – I will call them “ops”.  Each of the ops faces impossible odds against success and relies on fortuitous circumstances to come out just right.  In fact the infinitesimal likelihood of success for each successive op seems to decrease as we move forward in the story.  But love, not practicality, is the driver in this tale. Here, too, there is improbability, but as the story unfolds, the viewer is drawn into the relentless train of unlikely contingency that drives the action..

Op 1
First, Filippo needs to communicate surreptitiously with Philippa.  Through an extraordinarily contrived electrical accident, he sneaks a small tape recorder into Philippa’s pocket during one of her testimony sessions.  When she listens to the tape back in her cell, she learns of his plan and records her willingness to proceed.  However, the chances of Filippo’s plan succeeding take a devastating hit when we learn that the Carabinieri secretly record everything that goes on in Philippa’s cell; so they know all about Filippo’s intentions.

Op 2

Filippo has a plan to sneak Philippa up into the unused attic of the police station.  This caper is even more outlandish and unlikely, but it is successful.  In the evening when Filippo goes to join Philippa in the attic, she tells him that the only reason she is cooperating with Filippo is to see if she can have one more opportunity to murder the drug operator Vendice. 

Op 3
Filippo’s love for Philippa is without reservations, and he is totally committed to helping her, despite her apparent dismissal of lawful solutions to her frustrations.  In that evening he sneaks her into the office of the corrupt Carabinieri Major Pini and then, pretending to be a Pini assistant, manages to convince Vendice to rush over to the office that very night.  Again there are lucky circumstances, but everything breaks in Filippo’s way, and Philippa does kill Vendice. 

Op 4
After spending the night in the police headquarters attic, they still have to figure out a way to escape from the building, which is full of police looking for the two missing fugitives.  Early in the morning they sneak down to the garage and jump into the back of a milk delivery truck that is making its rounds.  The fact that they could find a spot behind some milk cartons to hide is something that Filippo is unlikely to have foreseen.  When the milk truck, still making its rounds, passes near the train station, the two fugitives jump out the back and get onto a train headed for the Italian countryside, where one of Philippa’s good friends lives.

Op 5
In the small picturesque town of Montepulciano, they are less likely to be identified, and things are more relaxed.  Philippa and Filippo enter a church, and while sitting in the pews, Philippa “confesses” to Filippo about all the past wrongs she has committed in her life.  She tells him that she has “ceased to believe’.When Filippo asks her in what she has ceased to believe, she tells him, “sense, justice, life, . . .”.  This is a real Kieslowski moment. It is at this point that he tells her that he loves her.  He does not want to possess her; he wants to become “one” with her, and this metaphorical union is progressing by degrees.  Their names are similar, their clothes are similar, and in order to lessen the likelihood of identification, they go to a barber and get their heads shaved. So now they look very similar, too.

Filippo’s father (Remo Girone), who is a senior policeman and sympathetic to his son’s plight, arrives in the town and tells them there is now a massive manhunt throughout Italy in search of them.  He offers to help them return to society, but Filippo and Philippa swear by their now mutually-confessed love and say they will struggle on alone.

Filippo and Philippa make it to their sympathetic friend’s countryside home, and that evening in the beautiful countryside surroundings, they consummate their love.  This is movingly presented by Tykwer in three successive long shots (roughly 30 seconds each) showing the two of them reveling in nature's wonders and each other.

In the morning a massive and heavily armed Carabinieri SWAT team arrives.  This leads to the final and most improbable escape yet.  They sneak onto a momentarily unattended Carabinieri helicopter and take off as the film ends.

We never know what happens to the two protagonists, so the adventure story, as well as the morality tale, are incomplete.  But the love story has reached its dramatic fulfillment.  And love is ultimately what the film is about. 

The production values of Heaven are of a high order.  In particular Tykwer’s camera work, editing, and narrative pacing are all superb.  Also excellent is the acting – especially that of Cate Blanchett, Giovanni Ribisi, and Remo Girone.  They manage to make what is essentially a fantasy seem real.

However, the moral side of this tale, to the frustration of some viewers, is set aside for the consideration of more personal and existential concerns. The probabilistic unreality of some of the film’s sequences make one wonder about the degree to which life is governed by chance or by some higher authorities. This consideration is enhanced by Tykwer’s occasional downward-looking aerial shots, suggesting a perspective outside the scope of the human participants.  And love seems to be part of this equation.

In fact the eternal mystery and magic of love come to life in this film as it unfolds.  How could Filippo love Philippa so suddenly? Moreover, Filippo is seven years younger than Philippa, and both his natural reticence and the constraining circumstances give him no opportunity to show himself to her.   How could she come to love him?   It is the artistry of the contributors to this film that make it come to life and help us see that love is just as much a driver of this world’s experiences and truths as nature’s mechanics.

★★★★

Notes:

1. Roger Ebert, “Heaven”, RogerEbert.com (18 October 2002).    
2. Episodes 5, 6, and 8 in that 10-part series relate most closely to the moral issues covered in Heaven.

“Cloud Atlas” - Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski, and Lana Wachowski (2012)

Cloud Atlas (2012) is a science-fiction/fantasy epic based on the acclaimed 2004 novel of the same name by David Mitchell. Scripted and directed by Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski, and Lana Wachowski, the film represents one of the more ambitious German attempts at a worldwide blockbuster. But despite some awesome dramatic and visual sequences, the conversion of the novel’s complicated narrative into film led to some problems that I believe were fatal to its ultimate success.

The film’s story actually comprises six separate, nested stories, and that construction presumably represents the fun that viewers have as they follow all six plots and piece them together in their minds. Although the six stories are loosely linked, each has a separate tale to tell and takes place during a separate period in human history:

1. Pacific Islands, 1849.  This tells the story of Adam Ewing, an American who travels to the Chatham Islands in the South Pacific to take care of some business arrangements.  During his visit he encounters a Moriori slave, Autua, who saves his life at one point, which leads Ewing to advocate for Autua’s freedom.  Upon his return to America, Ewing vows to join the abolitionist movement to emancipate slaves in the US.  So this story is about the moral awakening of a young man concerning social oppression.
2. Cambridge, 1936.  Robert Frobisher is a youthful composer involved in a gay relationship with fellow student Rufus Sixsmith. Frobisher manages to gain employment as an amanuensis for a well-known elderly composer, Vyvyan Ayrs.  Ayrs recognizes Frobisher’s musical talents and manages to steal some of his ideas and claim them for his own.  This story is further complicated by the fact that Frobisher is actually bisexual and has an illicit relationship with Ayrs’s wife.  Eventually the frustrated Frobisher commits suicide.  So this story is about finding fulfilment in an uncaring world by means of personal expression.
3. San Francisco, 1973.  An ambitious young investigative journalist, Luisa Rey, encounters by happenstance an older Rufus Sixsmith, who is a physicist and has documented information about unsafe new nuclear plants that is being suppressed by the always evil and extractive US energy industry.  Sixsmith is eventually killed by agents of the industry, as is another physicist.  Rey survives a further murder attempt by the US energy hitman and manages ultimately to reveal the evil doings.  Rey eventually publishes a murder mystery based on her experiences.
4. London, 2012.  Timothy Cavendish is an elderly publisher who gets into trouble with gangsters when he published a novel by one of their own. When he appeals to his wealthy brother, Denholme, for help, the brother gets Timothy locked away in a nursing home. Timothy’s goal is to escape this prison, and he eventually succeeds, which experience he later turns into a successful screenplay, “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish”.
5. Neo Seoul, 2144.  In the grim future, an oppressive corporate culture uses “fabricants”, genetically fabricated women who are used as slaves, as “comfort women”, and (we later find out) for food.  Sonmi-451 is one such fabricant, and she is rescued from her captive world by a clandestine rebel commander, Hae-Joo Chang, who reveals to her the full horrors of the oppressive society.  She and Chang are free long enough for her to make a dramatic public broadcast revealing the perfidy of the entire ruling coalition.
6. The Big Isle, 106 winters after the Fall. Sometime in the still more distant future, there has been some horrible apocalypse (“the Fall”).  Zachery lives in a primitive hunter-gatherer society that is preyed upon by another clan, the Kona tribe, that is literally blood-thirsty. Into this setting comes Meronym, who is from a technically advanced society and is looking for some abandoned telecommunications center she believes is hidden in the mountains and which she wants to use to send messages to surviving colonies on other planets.  Suspicious at first, Zachery and Meronym gradually come to trust each other, fend off the predatory Konas, and make their way to safety on another planet.

Each story is presented in a different cinematic style that evokes a separate cinematic genre.  Stories 1, 5, and 6, having settings that are the most remote from own our circumstances, were directed by the Wachowski brothers; while stories 2, 3, and 4 that are closer to home were directed by Tom Tykwer. The Wachowski-directed stories are fantasy pieces – filled with violence and heavily dependent on their atmospheric settings. They are not so much stories as mood pieces, and that is where they are most effective. The Tykwer narratives, on the other hand, are more dramatic and more devoted to character establishment and development. Story 3 is like a murder mystery, and story 4 is essentially a comedy.

Each of the five stories that precede the last one produces some narrative document that is passed on to the next story.  In Story 1, Ewing produces an account of his experiences that is later read by Frobisher in Story 2.  Frobisher’s letters come into the hands of Liusa Rey in Story 3.  Rey’s novel based on her experiences comes into the hands of publisher Cavandish in Story 4, and the movie based on Cavendish’s experiences is watched by Sonmi-451 in Story 5.  Sonmi-451's famous broadcast in Story 5 becomes the basis of a mystical cult that is worshiped by Zachery’s clan in Story 6.

In addition, the principal characters in each of the stories has the same mysterious birthmark that is presumably supposed to provide some linkage between these characters.

These linkages may have worked well in Mitchell’s novel, but they are lost in the film and seem mysterious but come off as pointless red herrings. There are other commonalities, such as imprisonment and slavery (Stories 1, 4, and 5), as well as murder (all stories), but these are not explicitly linked in any meaningful way.

In fact the film directors made two structural modifications to what was in the original novel that had ruinous consequences.  In Mitchell’s novel, the stories are told mostly sequentially up to just before the denouement of each.  Thus we have (most of) Story 1, followed by most of Story 2, etc.  Then the author goes back and covers the respective denouements in reverse (unwinding order).  There is a certain logic to this arrangement that might work.  In each of the concluding parts of the various stories, there is a rebellious act that represents liberation, and the unwinding of these respective heroic acts of self-sacrifice might have a cumulative impact.

But in the film presentation all the six stories are told in parallel, with constant cross cuttings between stories in mid-flight.  This might excite the viewer as the action jumps back and forth between all six stories – so the viewer may have fun trying to figure things out.  But the jumps are largely nonsensical and distract the viewer from whatever inner logic may exist in each story.  In fact there are disruptive jumps between stories even in the middle of important conversations and in the middle of dramatic shootouts.  It would have been much better to stick to Mitchell’s narrative structure.

Another problem, in my opinion, is the use of the same actors and actresses in each of the stories (clearly not an aspect of the written novel). Thus Tom Hanks, Halle Barry, Jim Broadbent, Jim Sturges, Ben Whistlaw, and Doona Bae appear in multiple stories, sometimes as principal characters and otherwise as background characters.  And Hugh Grant and Susan Sarandon have minor (and very unbecoming) roles in many of the stories, too.  The viewer may have fun picking them out in the various scenes, but there doesn’t seem to be any logic to this, either.  And the consequence is that one is further pulled out of involvement in the narrative. There are no characterological connections across the multiple roles played by any of the actors, and these multiple appearances are little more than visual distractions.

On top of all this, there is an awful lot of unmotivated killing, mainly in the Wachowski pieces. This is presumably made acceptable, because the antagonistic forces are so evil.  But these bad guys are so superficially and exaggeratedly evil as to be ludicrous.  And the ghostly demon, “Old Georgie”, who is visible only to Zachary in Story 6 makes no sense whatsoever, other than to depict another weird embodiment of evil.
 

Cloud Atlas does have some redeeming virtues, however.  The technical effects are sometimes breathtaking.  And indeed, even though I admire Tykwer’s work (notably Winter Sleepers, 1997, and Run Lola Run, 1998) more than the Wachowski’s (famous for the Matrix films), I most enjoyed the Wachowski-produced sci-fi imagery of Story 5. The haunting images of Sonmi-451 (Doona Bae) and Hae-Joo Chang (Jim Sturgess) create a lasting, eerie mood to this story – as if we are watching some sort of iconic masque pageant with hidden meanings.  This effect is created by showing repeated images of Doona Bae’s expressionless face as she narrates the circumstances of her servitude and rebellion.

So chalk this one up as an interesting (and expensive) attempt that failed to deliver a coherent and meaningful experience.

★★½