1988 British film
Stealing Heaven is a 1988 film directed by Clive Donner and starring Derek de Lint, Kim Thomson and Denholm Elliott. It is a costume drama based on the French 12th-century medieval romance (a true story) of Peter Abelard and Héloïse and on a historical novel by Marion Meade. This was Donner's final theatrical film, before his death in 2010.
Plot
Peter Abelard is a famous teacher of philosophy at the cathedral school of Notre Dame, and a champion of reason. At a time when academics are required to observe chastity, he falls in love with one of his students, Héloïse d'Argenteuil, a sixteen-year-old gentlewoman raised in a convent, who has both intellectual curiosity and a rebellious view of the low status of women in 12th-century Europe.
When the relationship is suspected, Heloise's uncle Fulbert, who had other plans for her marriage, works with the bishop of Paris to put a stop to it.[1] Nevertheless, Abelard and Heloise pursue their relationship; they make love in her bed and also within a barn (they are overheard by a peasant girl when they come) and eventually have a child and later are secretly married. Abelard struggles with himself for acting against the will of God by loving Heloise. Her uncle takes a terrible revenge on Abelard for ruining Heloise's chances of an advantageous match.[2]
Production
The picture was filmed on location in Yugoslavia.[3] Denholm Elliott had worked with Donner before, having starred in Nothing But the Best (1964).
Reception
Michael Wilmington of the Los Angeles Times called the movie "fascinatingly retrograde", as it "suggests the ‘60s: decade of turbulence, idealism, sex and riot." He notes that the director, Clive Donner, had made his best known films in that decade, such as The Caretaker (1963) and What’s New, Pussycat? (1965). Wilmington is critical of the production and the characterizations and he objects to the omission of the couple’s important surviving love-letters, but he finds the actors easy to watch. "De Lint glows with dedication, Thompson tosses her great Cosmo cover-girl mane ravishingly. Elliott is a fine, squirrelly, sweating villain."[3]
Caryn James reviewed the picture in The New York Times:
The wonder is not that Stealing Heaven ultimately fails, but that this relatively modest production comes so close to succeeding. Directed by Clive Donner with a small budget, an uneven script and a wonderful cast, Stealing Heaven at times seems like a poor cousin to The Lion in Winter crossed with Camelot and highlighted with steamy sex scenes. But overall, it is a serious telling of the story, suggesting the stateliness and rigidity of the world that the intellectual and sensual Heloise and Abelard resisted.[4]
