Movie Reviews : ‘Stealing Heaven’ Updates Heloise and Abelard

There is something fascinatingly retrograde about the movie “Stealing Heaven,” (Westside Pavilion). Set in 12th-Century France, it’s based on the legendary affair of Heloise and Abelard. But instead of the year 1118, or yesterday, the movie suggests the ‘60s: decade of turbulence, idealism, sex and riot.

The film, shot in Yugoslavia, apes the style of the big ‘60s costume pictures. And writer Chris Bryant paints the lovers as a quintessentially ‘60s pair: long-haired beauties trapped in a cloistered society, battling the hypocrites and meanies, the crooked parents, frigid nuns, cops, sneering churchmen, who want to stifle their passion.

“Heaven’s” Peter Abelard (Derek de Lint) is a charismatic teacher who drinks with his students and encourages them to question orthodoxy. And Heloise (Kim Thompson) looks like a pseudo-hippie rich girl, Burne-Jones mixed with Haight-Ashbury, blasting convention at every opportunity, twitting her twitching uncle Fulbert (Denholm Elliott) about his phony religious relics.

One thing that doesn’t peg this film as a ‘60s product is the unblinkered sexuality. The eroticism and the ideas get overripe early on. Bryant has the pair getting hot for each other by discussing philosophy; they leer over theological ripostes, as if each juicy premise were a chicken thigh from Tom Jones’ banquet seduction. There are more bad ideas: such as the scene where Abelard’s rascally students plant a naked prostitute in his bed. And another where a group of nuns is thrown out of the convent by a heartless bishop; as they go struggling up a hillside in the rain, one of them lugs a 6-foot wooden cross. (Couldn’t they wait and pick up a cross at the next convent?)

By the time we get to the crucial episode, Abelard’s castration by the hirelings of crazy Canon Fulbert, it’s played with incongruous (for here) restraint, as if the mutilation purged him of passion, making him a photogenic male saint, like Gregory Peck in “The Keys of the Kingdom.”

All of the characterizations are hard to swallow, but the actors are easy to watch. De Lint glows with dedication, Thompson tosses her great Cosmo cover-girl mane ravishingly. Elliott is a fine, squirrelly, sweating villain; he seems capable not just of castration, but of sneaking in and pulling hairs out of your nose in the dark.

The director of “Stealing Heaven,” Clive Donner, may be nostalgic. He made his best known and most admired films in the ‘60s: “The Caretaker,” “Nothing But the Best” and “What’s New, Pussycat?”--which, unfortunately, may have typed him as a king of high-style naughty camp. But, here, Donner shows some feeling and style. There is a grating soft-rock score, but the images look incongruously rich. The clever production designer Voytek, who did Polanski’s “Cul De Sac,” shows us Notre Dame in mid-construction, and Mikael Salomon’s cinematography is crisp, burnished and deep; full of plush interiors, mist-draped forests and hills.

True to ‘60s type, “Stealing Heaven” (MPAA rated R for copious nudity, sex and strong language) attacks repression as evil. But, what’s beautiful about the story is the fruit of repression: the letters the lovers wrote after their passion was frustrated and which the movie rarely bothers to quote. In a different key, made with either the chaste austerity of a Robert Bresson or the flamboyant screwiness of a Ken Russell, the film might have worked. In this middle ground, it becomes over-pretty, comic. The lovers turn into scamp-saints, exiled from a Zeffirelli movie into one by Zinnemann: “The Nun’s Story” with an emasculated theologian as suffering swain.