Minutes later, armed officers burst into Philippa¹s apartment and drag her down to headquarters. Interrogators call her a terrorist and demand to know her affiliation. Unaware what has happened, she is horrified to learn that she killed innocents; she crumbles and faints. When she comes to, she insists -- in English translated by novice policeman Filippo (Giovanni Ribisi) -- that her target was one wealthy businessman, Vendice (Stefano Santospago), who sells drugs, in particular to her recently overdosed husband and to children at the school where she teaches English. Her interrogators see her as a terrorist. Filippo falls in love with her and helps her escape.

Weird, startling and heartbreaking, Heaven combines the interests and sensibilities of two remarkable filmmakers. Written by the late Krzysztof Kieslowski (with Krzysztof Piesiewicz), and intended as part of a trilogy (Heaven, Hell and Purgatory), it explores accident and fate, guilt and grief, time and truth. These themes also interest the expansive and provocative director Tom Tykwer, whose earlier films, Run Lola Run (1999) and The Princess and the Warrior (2001), consider desire and need, fear and audacity, individuals in perpetual search of companionship and hope for a future that might only be imagined, all through the trope of ³lovers on the run.²

Heaven breathes delicate new life into all of these ideas, in Tykwer¹s peculiarly deliberate fashion. Philippa and Filippo quickly come to understand their uncanny, poetic connections, realized in the film¹s precise rhythms and magnificent compositions (shot by Tykwer¹s usual cinematographer Frank Griebe). More metaphorical than literal, the couple¹s journey includes Philippa¹s completion of her self-assigned task (her brutal and unnerving murder of Vendice), followed by a series of adventures in the Tuscan countryside. When Philippa wonders at changes in Filippo¹s plan, he assures her that his father, also a carabinieri, taught him, ³At the right moment, you have to do what nobody expects.²

Their moments together are at once excruciatingly poignant and weighted with expectation of a seemingly inevitable end. They ride out of carabinieri headquarters in the back of the morning milk truck, then must wait while the driver engages in a brief sexual tryst in the front seat. Barely daring to breathe or look at one another, they sit, hunched up, frozen. In an apparent effort to disguise themselves, they get their heads shaved, which leaves them looking remarkably alike: pale, liquid-eyed, achingly thin. This mirroring, however, also marks their difference: her passion and desperation, his dedication and commitment, come together as if to make them whole.

As they seek passing respite in a church, Philippa confesses to Filippo that she has ³ceased to believe in sense, in justice, in life.² At the same time, however, their relationship embodies another kind of ³belief,² a shared destiny simultaneously transcendent and absolutely grounded in immediate circumstances. The questions emerging in their trajectory -- toward capture? toward flight? -- are unanswerable and increasingly abstract. If justice is impossible (for no sort of revenge or violence can achieve it), then what? Are systems of faith only ineffectual distractions, designed to allow daily life to continue? Will Philippa¹s punishment offer resolution or redemption? With such questions, Heaven only complicates the moral and political implications of terrorism, murder and state penal and judicial systems.

Alongside such intangibles, the pain and ecstasy revealed in Blanchett¹s and Ribisi¹s equally luminous performances are surprisingly corporeal. And that¹s what makes the film resonate, in the end, for all its lyrical excesses and haunting visuals. Gorgeous and imperfect, the yearning here is palpable.