Justice is something many people feel is nonexistent
now. They may turn on the news and see
headlines about chemical weapons used on innocent citizens, civil Wars that
appear to never end, or crowds in the street demanding a new constitution. The film Heaven,
directed by Tom Tykwer, deals with a this disbelief in justice, and considers
the weighty question of how justice can be achieved, , and much more all in the
span of 97 minutes. Tywker magnificently
directs this allegorical story through excellent acting and beautiful
cinematography, doing justice to a screenplay by the late Krzysztof Kieslowski,
director of classics The Decameron and
the Three Colors series
Heaven is the story of a
teacher named Philippa who struggles to bring Mr. Vendice, the CEO of a large
corporation, to justice. Vendice sells
drugs to Philippa’s students, her husband—who dies of an overdose—and the
Italian police. Philippa takes action:
she plants a bomb in Vendice’s office, but (unknowingly at first) kills four
innocent people instead, and turns herself in.
The translator, Filippo, believes her while the other officers don’t; he
helps her escape, kill Vendice, and falls in love with her. In a pivotal scene, Philippa confesses all of
her sins to Filippo and receives no judgment from him, only love, and realizes
she loves him as well, because of his compassion for her and justice.
Heaven contains little
dialogue from some of the characters, and demands body language from actress
Cate Blanchett (Philippa) and actor Giovanni Ribisi (Filippo) to develop their
characters’ personalities. The pinnacle
of Blanchett’s performance is the scene when Philippa learns she murdered four
innocent people (two of them young girls) and not Vendice. The shock on her face comes on slow at first,
but quickly escalates to her crying, unable to form words, and finally fainting
from the shock. At this moment, we
believe Philippa is real as well as her pain.
Blanchett perfectly conveys that Philippa is not evil or the cold
character she appears to be in the second scene of the film. When she plants the bomb and talks to the
police, she does so without emotion, without the thought of killing someone for
the first time. No, Blanchett’s
excellent acting lets us rethink our judgments of her. In the case of Ribisi, who hardly has any
lines, he uses very realistic body language as well, to reveal the personality
of Filippo. After Filippo tells Philippa
to put the recorder under a crevice in the table in the prosecutor’s office, he
waits until everyone has left, and frantically searches for it. The shot tracks him moving (from the POV
within the table) along the table, blindly feeling with his hands. Once he finds the recorder, he pauses and
grips it so tightly with relief we can see the whites of his knuckles. With this small action, Ribisi conveys how
important Philippa already is to him (at his point in the film, he has only
interacted with her for a few days) and that he is dedicated to helping this
one woman, without even showing his face.
Yet it is the cinematography that finishes developing Ribisi’s character
and the allegorical tale through the use of lighting.
Two excellent shots that help convey the underlining
meaning of the film are when Filippo cries in the darkness of the attic and as
he walks towards Philippa after making his final phone call to his
brother. After the murder of Vendice in the
middle of the night, Filippo and Philippa return to their hiding spot in the
attic of the police station. Philippa
rushes to lie down, whereas Filippo walks towards the window, which has a soft,
diffused light shining in. Filippo
becomes enshrouded in the light, which creates a halo-esque glow around his
figure as he cries. This is one of the
first visual hints of the allegorical story, all due to the lighting. The second shot, which is similar to the one
previously described, occurs just after Filippo finishes talking to his
brother, Ariel. As Filippo walks towards
Philippa, she sees him as a magnificent being for who he truly is (can you
guess what yet?)—though she may not exactly realize this—because of the way the
light captures him. In this shot Filippo
is centered in the frame, with light encompassing both sides of him. No one else in the film is shot this way—not
Philippa, his brother, or father.
Filippo becomes different from the rest of the characters because of the
use of this element.
Tykwer’s history as a filmmaker for making complex
characters and creating visually detailed stories shows in Heaven. In Run Lola Run (1998) Tykwer created
detailed characters through various cinematic elements such as motif of colors,
various mediums like animation or CGI, and allusive introduction scenes,
leaving us questioning the reality of how the world works sometimes; he does so
again in Heaven. This aspect of Tykwer’s filmmaking makes him
the ideal interpreter for this unfinished work of Kieslowski’s, who also used
color and imagery in films like Red
and The Souble Life of Veronique to
examine deeper meanings behind the surfaces of the everyday. , In this instance,
the way we are meant to question reality this time around is to ask who delivers justice in a corrupt society: the
judge, the victim, or even the divine?
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