Heaven's Tears

I chose to watch this film because I am a Stephen Nichols fan. Unfortunately, I am unhappy with Mr. Nichols' choice to do this movie. The film was slow, badly acted, and included some very graphic sex scenes of Mr. Nichols' character with a very young woman. Watch at your own peril!

Heaven's Tears is close to the worst film I've ever seen. The plot is so ludicrous and implausible, it's incomprehensible. A soldier in the Nazi army during Hitler's regime, whose father is in the upper ranks of the Third Reich, is driving in the country one afternoon when he clips the bicycle of a teenage girl who appears suddenly before he can stop. The girl is knocked off her bicycle and the officer stops to attend to her. The girl is not seriously hurt. She's also beautiful, and the officer is instantly smitten. The girl also turns out to be Jewish, which, needless to say, is more than a minor inconvenience for the young couple. True love is not to be deterred, however, and the Nazi and the Jewish girl set out to persuade their families to accept their unlikely match, as well as their respective communities that each is wrong about the other. Where is Hank Williams, Jr., when you need him?

It gets worse from there, as well as more imbecilic a plot as the story progresses (not to mention seriously offensive). It defies imagination that someone fancying himself a writer could sell this script to a film studio, and that any producer would consider making it a movie. The film was made in The Netherlands, no doubt because no studio in the US would touch this idiotic piece of trash with a pole of any length, which actually restores a drop of respect to my regard for Hollywood.  Even as an "it's-so-bad-it's-hilarious" diversion, I could not stomach watching it to the end. Ed Wood himself never crafted as nonsensical a stink bomb as this. Zero stars.

This film is nicely done. The cinematography is lovely, the locations shot in Czech Republic beautiful. A story of forbidden attraction due to age and race during what was very dangerous times as the Nazi protectorate took over the country, a time few can understand or relate to now. But life then was so different then and often romances escalated with a sense of urgency with no guarantees of tomorrow. A small film but well done.

I watched this movie because I like movies about Germans or other types falling for Jews during this time period. I have never seen any of the actors in anything else before, so I can't judge them on previous roles. I thought it was an all right movie, not great, but not bad either.

I liked the way Beata Pozniak played Ingrid, she was quite nasty and vile, but I loved her. She actually had the best role. I loved her voice, and she was very stunning.

Lisha, who played Celandine, wasn't the best. There was really nothing to Celandine, you didn't really feel any emotions for her. I don't feel that I got to know her.

Peter Steiner, played by Stephen Nichols, gave me that same feeling. Peter was very underdeveloped. You just didn't care about these people.

As for the sex, I didn't see that there was anything porn-like about it.

Stephen just looks too old to play this role, though. I mean, really.

The parts that really made me feel something in this film were Beata's scenes, the shots of the real Nazi Soldiers and Hitler, and the scene between Peter and Celandine in the car.

The real shots of the Nazi soldiers made me shudder. Those were just creepy.

The scene in the car was SO romantic, and actually, it was more erotic in my mind, the way they touched hands.

There are times when, less than halfway through a movie, I start to wonder what the creators were thinking that made them decide not to burn every reel of footage and instead release a movie that has no real merit of any kind. And I mean any kind. This movie doesn't even hold up as made-for-cable porn. In fact, Heaven's Tears is completely and utterly boring, and at times a bit disturbing in its naivete. The girl, who is, as I recall, eighteen, masturbates while thinking of an older Nazi who hit her with a car--the "bumping into her in the hall as a way of introducing ourselves" syndrome from sitcoms and Robert Zemekis films. Then, on their second or third meeting--get this--he is the shy one, the one who is resistant to the girl's sexual advances, and yet, all she has to say is, "I'm old enough. I'm want to," and he takes her to bed. Then, after sleeping with this girl he hardly knows, he feels completed, as if he could die right there in the bed with her and he'd have lived a full life. It's like "Lolita" without a shred of social and personal commentary.

The cinematography is the most boring part of the movie. No interesting angles or originality at all, not even for the sex scenes, which are supposed to be the main draw for these kinds of movies. The masturbation scene is just a camera circling the girl's bed (very fake looking, as if it's on a stage), and it's interspliced with her fantasy of the man taking a shower in a waterfall. The "I am completed" scene is just a close-up of the girl's right side (head down to her breasts) with the guy on top of her, and it's the same shot for the whole time, even though there are repetitious cuts to a fairly unrelated scene of the Nazi's older sister, who has some kind of incestuous crush on him (she's ridiculous and silly, so it doesn't matter). I think the whole thing lasts five to ten minutes, and it's neither enlightening nor arousing.