Allegro (NC)

After the success of his debut feature, Reconstruction, which won the Camera d’ Or at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, director Cristoffer Boe was always going to be lumbered with the dreaded curse of every new-found talent, the ‘eagerly awaited second film’. While Reconstruction was a puzzle-piece love story set in Copenhagen mixed with science-fiction/fantasy elements concerning memory and loss, his follow-up, Allegro, is practically more of the same.

Dumped by his girlfriend Andrea (Christensen), Zetterstrøm (Thomsen), an introverted and distrustful classical pianist decides to forget his past, leave his home of Copenhagen and dedicate himself to finding musical perfection. After leaving, a mysterious force-field encloses a section of the city, becoming known as The Zone. No one can enter and no one can leave. Ten years later, he receives an invite to return home to play a concert from a stranger called Tom (Moritzen, also the films narrator), claiming that Andrea has been kidnapped and held captive within The Zone. He doesn’t remember who Andrea is (he has no memory of his life prior to the last ten years), but curiosity gets the better of him and he accepts. With directions written on a postcard, he finds a way (through a cubicle in a women’s toilet) into The Zone. There he meets the wheelchair-bound Tom, who explains that Zetterstrøm’s self-inflicted amnesia and the mysterious Zone are closely connected. Discovering about his past, the real reasons behind the break-up, and having his musical talent stolen from him, he is determined to find Andrea and retrieve his memories.

With obvious homage to Andrei Tarkovsky, in particular The Zone which grants wishes in Stalker and the planet that brings memories to life in Solaris, Allegro attempts to examine the memory of its main character by producing a surreal, cryptic landscape filled with ambiguous characters and mysterious encounters. Moments of his past are revealed to him via photographs, video or played out on stage by Zetterstrøm himself and Andrea, while he watches helplessly from the side. He continually bumps into himself as a child (played by real-life piano prodigy Svetoslav Korolev), figures from his past frequent the almost-deserted bars and shops, and Andrea is glimpsed walking through the labyrinthine streets oblivious to Zetterstrøm’s calls.

Technically very impressive, Boe mixes together film and digital, time-lapse photography and some brilliant animated expositional segments, stylised lighting and atmospheric set design, all successfully representing a world of shifting planes of fantasy and reality. The visual effect of the force-field surrounding The Zone is brilliantly done, giving the impression of a giant television screen, shimmering and flickering, such as in one scene with two young boys throwing a ball against it causing the image of the street opposite to electronically stutter and fizz.

Unfortunately Boe loses control of the narrative and the promise of the first half hour or so. Attempting to create an exploration of time and memory reminiscent of the narrative jigsaws of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Alain Resnais, particularly Last Year at Marienbad, or Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Allegro doesn’t manage to keep the viewer’s interest in what the protagonist is trying to find out. One of the main reasons for this is that there is no conviction or belief evoked by the love affair that caused the whole situation in the first place.

Thomsen gives a good performance, portraying Zetterstrøm’s uptight and introspective confusion, disbelief and anguish perfectly. Christensen, in her debut role, is also very good when she is allowed on screen doing more than merely posing for close-ups. The audience isn’t given the chance to care about her character or how Zetterstrøm feels, and by given us a quick, rough sketch, it could seem as though he is merely over-reacting to a quick fling (albeit with an ex-supermodel). There is no chemistry between Thomsen and Christensen, unlike the crackling likeability of Carrey and Winslet in Eternal Sunshine, and the resulting faux-psychoanalytical anguish comes across as an excuse for Boe to flash his technical skills. It’s sadly ironic that a story about an emotionally vacuous perfectionist is told in a film which is technically impressive but fails to convince us of its feelings.

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