Allegro Review

Ulrich Thomsen stars as Zetterstrom, a talented but emotional cold concert pianist driven by an intense perfectionism. His one truly human contact is with Andrea, the loving young woman played to great effect by model turned actress Helena Christensen. When Andrea leaves him with no warning or explanation Zetterstrom shuts down completely, sealing his emotions and memories off entirely, and while his playing career thrives he is barely a shell of a human. It is at this same time that the Zone appears, a small neighborhood in Denmark somehow inexplicably sealed off from the rest of the world, visible yet impenetrable. Does the Zone somehow hold the key to Zetterstrom’s salvation?

Hailing from a country best known these days for pushing a return to realism in film making, Boe stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from most of his contemporaries. He is the anti-Dogme director, fully embracing the techniques and technologies of film making. He aims to find truth in style, employing absolutely anything that will help him reach his goals and when he is on his game it is something spectacular to behold. The opening sequence alone features richly over saturated high contrast photography, time lapse tricks, hand drawn art overlaid on film and hand drawn animation.

Boe’s skill is amply evident in the film’s stunning minutes but his reliance on artifice quickly becomes his undoing thanks to an enormously obtrusive narrator with a gift for restating what is already perfectly obvious from the performances and breaking the mood entirely in the process. Thomsen and Christensen play off each other fantastically well but the director simply can’t seem to stop himself from throwing his own two cents in when they are neither needed nor helpful. It is almost as though Boe can’t bring himself to trust the performances on screen to tell the story, a rich irony considering that trust and emotional openness are key themes.

As the film progresses it becomes clear that there simply isn’t enough here to sustain the film over its running time. Things become repetitive and subtlety goes out the window as key themes, moments and ideas – or rather, idea, as there really is only one - are spelled out in painstaking detail, a major reversal from Reconstruction where Boe left it to the audience to keep up and provided a much richer experience for putting that trust in his viewers.

With high expectations come the risk of increased disappointment. From another film maker Allegro would likely earn itself a certain amount of praise for its visual style and the performances of Thomsen and Christensen. From Boe, however, this stands as a significant disappointment, a major step back from his debut.