Before his tragically early death six years ago, Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski was preparing another film trilogy, to be called Heaven, Hell and Purgatory; he had written Heaven, with his regular collaborator Krzysztof Piesiewicz, and now that script has been made into a film by Tom Tykwer, of Run Lola Run fame.
Phillipa, Cate Blanchett, is an Englishwoman who lives in Turin, and works there as a teacher. Her husband has recently died from a drug overdose, and the kids she teaches are already taking the stuff. She knows who the local drug czar is because her husband knew him. He's a respectable businessman, though, and the authorities take no notice of her attempts to get him arrested. So she takes the law into her own hands, with fateful results, and finds herself on the run, accompanied by a sympathetic cop, Filippo, Giovanni Ribisi.
Considering the background of this film, it's hard to imagine more different cinematic sensibilities than Kieslowski and the director of Run Lola Run and The Princess And The Warrior, Tom Tykwer; and there's no doubt that Kieslowski's Heaven would have been very different from this one; but somehow the blend of the Pole's cerebral, moral world and the German's action oriented world works. The casting of Cate Blanchett was fortuitous, because she gives another quite wonderful performance, and Giovanni Ribisi is good, too, as the young policeman. In the end there are rather too many loose ends and improbabilities to make the film completely successful, but there's a lot to enjoy in Heaven.
