Review of Heaven (1987) by Alison O — 24 Nov 2007

Best in Show: Cate Blanchett.

One for the future: Giovanni Ribisi.

Stand-out scene: Ending.

Brainer or no-brainer: Brainer.

Stands up to one viewing or repeated?: Repeated.

DVD commentary any good?: n/a.

DVD.

Two years after they appeared in the fairly standard thriller The Gift, Cate Blanchett and Giovanni Ribisi are reunited in this cracking Italian/UK made film. The masterful Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski (who brought us the Three Colours trilogy and The Double Life of Veronique) wrote the screenplay to this as the first of a new trilogy, Heaven, Hell and Purgatory.

One would have thought that the first of these would be the least dark of the three but going by this, I wonder how much of the emotional wringer the viewer would be required to go through in parts two and three as this pulls on your heart strings to the max.

The best 'European' offering i've seen in a while thanks to the breathtakingly moving performance from Cate Blanchett this is a film where you hook line and sinker believe that the love story that is unfolding before your eyes is 100% per cent geuinine and at the end your brain struggles to file the title under 'fiction' rather than 'documentary'.

Phillipa (Cate Blanchett) is a widower determined to stop at source the flow of drugs coming into the school where she's a teacher.That her beloved husband has also died at the hands of the man responsible leads her to step up her campaign and she plants a bomb in his office. However, things do not go as planned and she ends up an empty shell, incarcerated at the local police station and now a murderer of innocents herself. A young interpreter, Filipo is so moved by her story that he falls for his prisoner.

Like Munich, this muses on the thorny issue of whether eye for an eye retaliation just leads to more and more pain and heartache and the lead actors do a great job of investing the project with a real emotional heart. The ambigious ending is one of the best i've seen in a long while and stayed with me for days afterwards. A real pearl.