Cold Heaven

Could this be by the same director as Don't Look Now or Bad Timing? Poorly

acted, clunkily edited. You only have to compare the various accident scenes in this with similar ones in Don't Look Now to see how much Roeg has lost his

touch.

Even the generally reliable Teresa Russell (looking a bit chunky these days, I'm afraid to report) cannot save this one. The plot is pure pseudo-religious hokum, the acting is wooden and Roeg's attempts at his trademark dislocation of time are pitiful.

Avoid this one like the plague.

Its cinematic treatment of the dead coming to life is the most interesting take I've seen on the genre. He is like coming apart at the seams. Its job is to cast a spell around the rest of the movie. This is the stuff of high theater. It is both literal and symbolic at once, a very Japanese treatment. Every time I remembered it from my first viewing it was just that guy's portrayal of the undead.

Somebody said it's like a soap opera performance, but this is exactly it. He is performing a soap opera character except vomiting blood, hurling, and having Frankenstein meltdowns. Instead of using soap as a pejorative, we can say it is a high art treatment of a soap. But the average viewer might not realize it, somehow this might play straight to them.

There is something about the contrast of the cable TV movie, with a Nic Roeg film, that is both jarring and weird, but never operating outside the viewer and the screen.

The climax of the movie is a cross being burned into the hill by God, then she runs in his arms, the saxophone plays. The film is about her thoughts of infidelity haunting her, and her returning to live in service to God.

I was not sure if she would run into the lovers arm because that would be a valid reading of the film as well. To forget her husband, he was dead all along, to move on. It would be a tale of sexual healing and grief. But Roeg had made that film several times by that point. Instead, to elevate such a small human dilemma to the grandest stage is the power of melodrama, the power of art.

Some of the early Peter Weir films dealt with white guilt and aboriginal spirituality with some of these tones. Another review said with auteurs we don't watch their filmography expecting them to top themselves, we go for the small pleasure of how they have twisted the dial slightly differently. All that is interesting in his films are here, although it does a disservice to put them into words. So a Christian work is unexpected, but using his avant-garde eye becomes a spontaneous combustion; it is impossible to go wrong dealing with the very symbols of reality, life, death, love, morality.

The lightning bolt awakening becomes something in films; that enlightenment isn't just about that, but about the inverse, a complete intolerance toward immorality. This is why her awakening is triumphant. It brought him back, finally, for real. Roeg was the rarest thing, a western auteur, uncompromising and without commercial interests. But this, his most obscure work is somehow his most directly meaningful, but at the same time you sense that having such direct answers is kind of a problem for him.

That the release of this film by director Nicolas Roeg and starring his wife Theresa Russell was delayed for 2 years says a lot about its perceived commercial prospects. The Roeg/Russell partnership's previous titles - Bad Timing, Eureka, Insignificance, and Track 29 - were a good warning, where Russell has been better served by other directors, and Roeg's interest in fractured narrative has left audiences in a quandary.

The material here is based on a novel by Brian Moore, which is an exploration of Catholic faith, but the screenplay by Allan Scott makes this seem ludicrous eg The Virgin Mary is seen by a convent, asking for the "building of a sanctuary", and the idea of a dead man coming back to life being a "demonic possession" is dismissed by a priest since "Life and death belong to God, but everything else is ours to decide". We can tell Roeg isn't really interested in providing an explanation to poor Russell, whose Los Angeles pathologist husband Mark Harmon, is supposedly killed in a boating accident during a holiday in Mexico (the book had the holiday in France), when the conclusion is weightless. Much is made of Russell as an unfaithful wife and how it is often the disbelievers that are visited by God, but when we are told of the real meaning of The Virgin Mary's message, it is laughably trite.

Roeg uses Moore's plot as a supernatural excuse to present his editing flourishes, with cross-cutting between sleeping Russell, her married lover James Russo, and Harmon in the morgue; Russell and Russo having sex cut against Russo and his wife Julie Carmen fighting; and Roeg's big one, Russell on a Carmel clifftop as The Virgin Mary makes an apocalyptic appearance whilst Russell rolls around in the dirt. The boating accident scene is pleasingly underscored with the music of Stanley Myers, though we get water on the camera, interiors are generally underlit with matching muffled dialogue and Russell's whispered thoughts on the soundtrack, Harmon wears pancake makeup and spits blood, and there is a subjective camera shot with a white veiling. However on the plus side is a scene where Russell is surrounded by butterflies, her Del A Dey-Jones hats, her willingness to appear overweight in a bikini, and the remarkably unmannered performance of Russo. An indication of Roeg's touch is when Russell tells a priest of her vision of The Virgin Mary, where Roeg undermines Russell's acting by cut-aways to the priest and long shots away from her as she paces.

I wanted to like this movie, but couldn't follow it. It flashes back and forth and provides real time dialogue intermixed with whispers, which are the main characters thoughts. She thinks she is going crazy, and after listening to all the whispering, you will think you are, too. The husband, a role phoned-in by Mark Harmon, is either dead or alive or brought back to life, or never really got hurt. I can't figure it out. Seeing Talia Shire play an overzealous nun was just bad casting. And seeing the monsignor's face transform several times in a few seconds just made me queasy. I think it was supposed to be a metaphor for her new faith being tested. The premise of the story is impressive, too bad it didn't get the screenplay it deserved.

This movie almost plays better in you mind, in retrospect. It tackles several complex themes, which it then twists and entwines. The results, while not always successfully resolved, none the less provide something rare today; Food for thought. Among other things, this film deals with, adultery, faith, and redemption. Beautifully filmed, we are introduced to a wife of a doctor, whose flirtations are actually killing her husband. The wife is a non believer, yet she somehow finds herself involved in something that she cannot explain. She is both a unwitting pawn, in a miraculous event, that tests the faith of a minister and a Nun, and challenges her to examine her own disillusion with her marriage and her husband. She comes to realize that her outside affair with a handsome young man, directly affects the health of her husband, (who comes back from the dead.!) she is confused. And then there are those visions of the virgin Mary....Not your usual shoot em up..... oddly paced, yet affecting.