HEAVEN: A Theological View
:: Tucker Else :: 11.12.02

Q: What is it you're trying to capture?

KK: Perhaps the soul. In any case, a truth which I myself haven't found. Maybe time that flees and can never be caught.

I have been thinking about heaven a lot: the movie, the concept, and the place. In terms of the movie, I have read a number of reviews, hoping to get some insight as to what it means (other than “was it good or bad”). Striking in absence has been a theological study of the film. Maybe that's because most reviewers don't find the film to be very deep or spiritual. Possibly, and more likely, is the fact that reviewers wish to avoid such topics because they are so arbitrary. One of the things Kieslowski was respected and reviled for was his penchant for making something real into something metaphysical. In all of his movies, there is an element of the ephemeral (destiny as a concrete subject in Rouge, equality as the end of transcendent ideological redemption in Blanc, as examples). Tom Tykwer, who directed the Kieslowski/Pieswic screenplay, has also explored such things as fate, destiny, and what can only be termed as the supernatural in movies like Run Lola Run and The Princess and the Warrior, and has essentially made a career out of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. He now takes on the task of putting Kieslowski’s vision to screen, much as Steven Spielberg did with Stanley Kubrick’s Artificial Intelligence. The collaboration isn’t entirely successful, really, but I still can’t help but think…what does it all mean?

I drove to Chicago last Monday evening after work, arriving in the Lincoln Park area around 9:00 p.m. After paying a quick visit to Facets on Fullerton (an outstanding establishment selling and offering for rental a number of hard-to-find international films), I went to the theatre, giddy with anticipation. Rouge was the last movie that Kieslowski ever directed. After the release of that film, he retired at the relatively young age of 54 with the idea that he would spend the remainder of his days in his native Poland, sitting on a park bench, smoking cigarettes. Unfortunately, he died shortly thereafter. But not before beginning what would be his next trilogy (after Trois Couleurs). He and his writing partner, Kristof Piscewicz, began working on Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. The two had, throughout their collaboration, continually hit on the metaphysical: as much as fraternity, equality, and liberty are mired in the realm of subjective criticism, heaven, hell and purgatory would be as well, only more so. Their 1988 ten-hour manifesto, Decalogue, worked through the Ten Commandments, attempting to represent how God’s perfectly idealized laws play out in an imperfect world.

Kieslowski has said before that his films all serve as outlines for the next. You can see that from his earliest works, such as Camera Buff and No End, where the ideas of moral absolutes are thrown into seemingly impossible situations, and how man attempts to resolve such conflicts. I would posit that Kieslowski, throughout his canon, has attempted to understand who God is and what His relationship is with us. Kieslowski has made no claim to be Christian, but one would be hard-pressed to find the man to be an agnostic. A person can be a secularist as well as a moralist. That is where Kieslowski fits in. He makes no claim of understanding God. He makes no claim that there is actually even order in the Universe. However, he does seem to imply that there is a higher power that has put us here with a moral compass to give us order, even if we fail to live according to that compass (and in the process lose all semblance of order). I have pictured in my mind the two angels in Wim Wenders’ Der Himmel Uber Berlin, who walk around a broken Berlin able only to observe, never to affect. In Rouge, Valentine tells the Judge, whom she hardly knows, “Something is happening.” She has no idea what, she has no sense of what the something will ultimately mean, but there is a recognition of something that steers us. It has been said that, in a way, Kieslowski plays the role of God as a filmmaker…he controls his subjects, puts them into certain difficult circumstances, and then sits back and sees what will happen.

Heaven begins with Filipa, an English schoolteacher in Turin, Italy, planting a bomb in a high-rise office building. We learn that the man she intends to kill is the leading drug-dealer in the city, a man who has not only killed her husband, but one of her students, as well. She believes that she is justified in killing the man, as retribution, and as a way to clean up the city (and save her students). After she is captured by the police (she lets them know that she is the bomber), she is brought in for questioning and is told that the bomb did not kill who she had intended, but a father and his two daughters, as well as the maid who moved the bomb from where it had been placed. Cate Blanchett very capably plays Filipa. When she discovers what she has done, even unintentionally, the pain is palpable. She collapses. The man who is serving as her interpreter, Filipo, immediately falls in love with her. The movie revolves then around their plot to escape (to go where?) and eventually turns into a sort of road movie.

So what was Kieslowski saying in Heaven? He gives the name Filipo to the young man in the story, played by Giovanni Ribisi. He gives the name Filipa to the young lady played by Cate Blanchett. There had to be a reason that the names are so similar. Phillip (English) in the Bible was known to be questioning. He questioned Jesus in feeding thousands with a few fish and loaves of bread. God uses questions to teach us. Filipa has done something that she believes to be morally justifiable. However, even though she didn’t intend to kill the innocents, she can hardly live with herself and believes that punishment is her due. Kieslowski has visited this terrain before. We make choices. We may even make choices with the best of intentions. However, a choice that involves violence may, however improbable, hurt others, and it is then that we face the moral conundrum. In Decalogue 5, we see a completely amoral killer who we are not to forgive. But we also see an ambitious young defense attorney morally opposed to the death penalty. In Heaven, “Thou Shall Not Kill” becomes an ethical complexity which Filipa never thought could be relevant in her unique case. Her intent was to do good! Just as in Rouge, when Valentine calls a Genevan heroine dealer and tells him that he should die, are we to believe that Valentine is threatening the man to deter him? It is likely that this man is providing Valentine’s brother with H, so is she threatening him as a means of retribution? We don’t know. But I find it interesting that the moral complexity in that short sequence is able to fill an entire two-hour movie. Kieslowski’s outline remains intact.

The reason I believe the movie was only partly a success was simply because I had such high expectations. Tykwer has always been hip and kinetic in his story telling. In this instance, it is almost as if he is deliberate out of respect to his Polish forbears. Granted, a techno soundtrack might not be appropriate for Heaven, but I think he could have brought more of his style and kept the vision of Kieslowski intact. The movie ends with Filipa and Filipo, still on the run from the Caribinieri, hi-jacking a helicopter and flying up until the helicopter fades from view completely. The ending is reminiscent of Bess’ bells in Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves. A supernatural ending. An ending open to interpretation. Did Filipa and Filipo reach heaven? Did they perish and meet their just end? If they did, in fact, make it to heaven…what does that even mean?