The film is set in Turin, Italy. It opens with a prologue sequence showing the young ItalianCarabinieri clerk Filippo (Ribisi) learning to fly a helicopter using a flight simulator. When he accidentally crashes the virtual helicopter by ascending too dramatically, his instructor tells him that "In a real helicopter, you can't just keep going up and up," prompting Filippo to ask, "How high can you go?" The film then cuts to Phillipa (Blanchett), who is preparing to plant a bomb in the downtown office of a high-ranking businessman. Although everything goes according to her plan, the trash can in which she places the bomb is emptied by a janitor immediately after she leaves and later explodes in an elevator, killing four people.
Philippa is tracked down by the Carabinieri, arrested, and brought to the station where Filippo works. When she is questioned, she reveals that she is an English teacher at a local school where several students have recently died of drug-related causes. Discovering that they had all been supplied by the same local cartel, she had contacted the Carabinieri with the names of the drug ring leaders, begging them to intervene, but was repeatedly ignored. At her wits' end, she decided to kill the leader of the cartel, the businessman whose office she targeted. In the process of her interrogation, Filippo (who is translating her confession for his superiors) falls in love with Philippa and helps her escape from Carabinieri custody. After she kills the drug lord who was her original target, the pair become fugitives from the law and flee to the countryside, where they eventually find refuge with one of Philippa's friends and finally consummate their relationship. When the authorities raid the house where they are hiding, they steal a Carabinieri helicopter parked on the front lawn and escape by air. The officers on the ground fire repeatedly at them to no avail as the craft climbs higher and higher and finally disappears.
Critical reception
Though comparisons abound to Kieślowski's earlier films, Roger Ebert also sees a similarity to Tykwer's own Run Lola Run and The Princess and the Warrior. Though Heaven is "more thoughtful, proceeds more deliberately, than the mercurial haste" of Tykwer's own films, "it contains the same sort of defiant romanticism, in which a courageous woman tries to alter her fate by sheer willpower."[1]
Alex Grant finds the film to be "an hommage to Italian painters of the C16th and C17th eras. European architecture has seldom played such a huge role in defining character and human interaction as Tykwer allows it to do here. Beings dwarfed and trapped by spaces both interior and exterior."[2]
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