Cate Blanchett stars as Philippa, a British teacher living in Turin, Italy, who has seen many friends, including her husband, fall victim to drug overdoses. Philippa has repeatedly contacted the police with information about Turin's biggest drug dealer but, complicit in his dealings, they have completely ignored her. So Philippa decides to dole out her own form of justice with a homemade bomb -- setting her off on a journey from young widow to fugitive on the run.
02 Dec Heaven (2002)
UnderItalian
All movies are about other movies, never life.
Kieslowski made a career out of making films that take a national filmmaking style and twisting them to new purposes, letting us know he is doing so in the process. ‘Three Colors’ was as much about French filmmaking and the French national character as it was the stories within. That business about watching with the watching creating accidents of fate…
He planned a similar trilogy that worked with Italian themes in life, but especially Italian filmmaking. Italian films are about the freshness of captured impulse, about excessive emotion and excessive theatricality expressing that emotion for the screen. About characters, never situations. About talking, often with overlapping threads. About the magic of place created by the magic of people.
Kieslowskis method (like Ang Lee’s method) is to come ever so close to the soul of the thing but be different in ways that matter but don’t necessarily show. That’s why you end up haunted by something that seems ordinary.
In this case, we have the importance of family but it is outside of the peer pressure that drives the thing in Tuscany. We have the magic of the land, but it is magic that the characters enter by transcending it rather than the ‘normal’ way of creating it in the soil by presence.
But most of all, we have passion almost exclusively without words. We have love driving fate and not the other way around. We have emotional minimalism down to the music. We have Griebe’s odd colours like frescos instead of real earth. We have always the threat that this is really magical rather than real.
To make this work requires an actress who can pull the entire world with her. The less noise she makes, the more we hear. Cate Blanchett is one of the three most powerful, multilayered actresses alive, and possibly the only one whose scalp could become the whole landscape. Watch how much she does with so little actual motion. She’s changing the way we dream.
BillyBob wrote ‘The Gift’ as if he really meant it, and with the same two actors created something blunt.
Posted in 2003
Ted’s Evaluation — 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.
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