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.

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.

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.

Nicolas Roeg ? He directed the classic supernatural thriller DON`T LOOK NOW didn`t he ? Strangely the aforementioned movie was broadcast on BBC television at the weekend which did tonight`s screening of COLD HEAVEN no favours what so ever .

You see it`s impossible not to compare COLD HEAVEN with DON`T LOOK NOW since they both have the same director and the same structure and for the first third of COLD HEAVEN I thought they also had the same plot except a dead husband had been substituted instead of a dead child , in fact my mind was set on this movie revolving around a grief stricken widow seeing her late husband running around Venice wearing a red anorak . This doesn`t occur but about one third of the way through the running time there`s a massive plot twist and despite being an essential plot twist it`s not explained in any great depth . In fact very little is explained in COLD HEAVEN which ruins the movie

People have mentioned the rather poor production values of COLD HEAVEN and it`s impossible not to notice them . If I didn`t no different I would have thought this was a TVM since it`s got a made for television feel to it right down to white capital letters in the title sequence . Roeg also tries to inject art house pretentions via spoken thought processes but again this doesn`t help the movie at all . One can`t help feeling Roeg should have put all his effort into the plot twists which are totally flat on screen

Cheap production values , disinterested directing and a really bizarre premise and screenplay make for a bad movie

I fear that with this movie and the stultifying Two Deaths, that Roeg has slipped semi-comatose into semi-retirement.I just hope that he can produce one final great classic that will sit alongside, Bad Timing, Performance, Eureka,Walkabout and The Man Who Fell To Earth in his mighty cannon.