Heaven (15)

Blood on her hands

The first thing we see in Heaven is a flight-simulation video. A man is learning to pilot a helicopter, and we follow his course through a screen of undulating hills and wooded vales. From behind an instructor's voice chips in with words of advice, until his student begins to steepen his ascent and spiral upwards. "You can't just keep going higher," the trainee is told – a helicopter isn't equipped for it. So we are given fair warning: this is a story about transcendence, about breaking limits and reaching for the sky. And, cheering though it can be to watch a movie whose reach exceeds its grasp, Heaven keeps "going higher" in all the wrong ways, whirlybirding into feyness, falseness, airy pretension.

The film has suitably lofty origins, being the first part of a trilogy written by the Polish auteur Krzysztof Kieslowski and his regular collaborator Krzysztof Piesiewicz. After Kieslowski died in 1996, the script found its way to Harvey Weinstein of Miramax, who offered it first to Anthony Minghella and, when he refused, to the German director Tom Tykwer. The latter, best known for the funky and arresting Run Lola Run, plainly doesn't suffer from a lack of confidence – it isn't every 37-year-old director who would take on the job of honouring the posthumous work of a revered European master. What's more, the Kieslowski script appears to have required more translations than a Eurovision Song Contest. Written in Polish, it was translated into French by one set of co-producers, then into English by another, before Tykwer did his own translation into German. Then, with Minghella's help, it was translated back into English. The screenplay of the completed film, just to cloud things a little further, is divided between Italian and English.

If, as Robert Frost suggested, poetry is "what gets lost in translation", should we perhaps worry for Heaven? As it transpires, the script plays with serviceable fluency, at least for the first hour while its thriller-esque plot unfolds. Cate Blanchett plays Philippa, an English schoolteacher working in Turin who plants a bomb in the office of a drugs kingpin after the police have consistently refused to investigate him. (Children at her school have been victims of his trafficking.) The bomb, via a hideous series of mishaps, ends up killing four innocent people, two of them children, and Philippa is promptly arrested and accused of terrorism. (This explains the film's two years on the shelf, pulled from the schedules following 11 September.) Of the interrogating carabinieri, only the translator, Filippo (Giovanni Ribisi), believes her story, and proceeds to fall passionately in love with her.

Well, stranger things have happened, and the sombre, meditative pace Tykwer establishes may encourage you to stick with it. The camera keeps swinging up to track solemnly over the city, like a recording angel weighed down by his wings. The eyes of God are upon us all, it seems, our innocence and guilt being His to decide. This drift towards the numinous is very much in the Kieslowski manner, and one can sense Tykwer organising his compositions and the play of light in homage to the late director.

It helps that his camera can linger on Cate Blanchett, her face a microsensitive barometer of anguish, dread and martyred resignation (she may put you in mind of Juliette Binoche's bereaved mother in Three Colours: Blue). The scene in which Philippa is told how her act of retribution has backfired calls forth one of the most genuine expressions of horror I've seen on an actor's face, and the chief interrogator's reaction to her fainting – he dashes a glass of water on her prone form – begins a remarkable turnaround in our sympathy. Giovanni Ribisi is not so astutely cast; his intense and slightly fetal aspect has been compelling before (in Saving Private Ryan and Boiler Room) but he doesn't have a romantic presence, and he's not a fair match for Blanchett.

That imbalance might not jar so much if the film had plausibly charted their falling in love, but instead they are presented to us, rather coyly, as a union of souls. His efforts to help her escape from custody are ingenious but, on inspection, ridiculous. The Turin carabinieri may feel inclined to sue on finding their HQ presented as the most lax security system in Western Europe. Indeed, the whole of Italy appears to have fallen asleep as the pair skip town unobserved and catch a train down to the sun-struck slopes of Tuscany.

Remind yourself of their names at this point, because the script begins to go heavy on the idea of twinning and fortuitous connection. Philippa and Filippo turn out to share the same birthday, then advertise their bond by wearing the same jeans-and-T-shirt combo and having their heads shaved. We hear reports of a police search, but in the meantime they hang out in lovely Montepulciano like a couple of Gap models. Could they possibly make themselves look more conspicuous, you wonder?

By this point the script is buckling under the strain of two very different sensibilities. Kieslowski's Catholic doominess is made plain when Philippa, numb with remorse, says she wants to be answerable for her crime, and her line that she doesn't believe "in sense, in justice, in life" also has the ring of Kieslowskian resignation. Yet there follows not the smallest effort at atonement; there's even a visual joke of hearing Philippa's voice as the camera fixes on a confessional, only to reveal her talking not to a priest but to Filippo on a pew nearby. Tykwer seems to have gone halfway towards Kieslowski's fatalism before swerving away to pursue his own romantic instincts: he wants the same spirited defiance that propels Franka Potente on her mercy dash in Run Lola Run. One gets the feeling that Heaven has been awkwardly patched together from Kieslowski's austere meditation on humankind and Tykwer's upbeat visions of transcendence. It looks inviting, but there's only hot air beneath.