SHOOT THE PIANIST : Christoffer Boe's 'Allegro' [4/10]

Monday, 02 October 2006

One unforeseen - and unexpectedly lingering - consequence of the Dogme 95 movement has been to make Danish films a regular fixture at British arthouses. Many of us have now become very familiar with the faces of Danish actors like Mads Mikkelsen (villain in the upcoming Bond epic Casino Royale), Paprika Steen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Ulrich Thomsen, Nicolas Bro and, from an older generation, Henning Moritzen (Moritzen and Thomsen were father and son in Thomas Vinterberg's Festen.)

Indeed, if you were to work out how many Danish films obtain UK distribution as a percentage of the total annual cinematic output, the rate would probably rival that of France - a country whose movies almost invariably seem to make it over the channel, regardless of merit. This state of affairs makes it all the more baffling and frustrating that one of the most striking Danish films of the decade, Jannik Johansen's terrific Hitchcockian thriller Murk (featuring Kaas and Bro) remains undistributed over a year after its UK premiere at the 2005 Edinburgh Film Festival. Perhaps the problem is that Murk is perhaps a little "too commercial" for British arthouses, too "arty" for multiplexes.

There's certainly no shortage of 'artiness' on show in writer-director Christoffer Boe's Allegro, however. The follow-up to the director's much-admired, multi-award-winning debut Reconstruction, Allegro is a pseudo-highbrow psychological drama with mild sci-fi elements about a classical pianist returning home to Copenhagen for a recital. Zetterstrom (Thomsen) hasn't been in the city for a number of years: he left after breaking up with a beautiful woman, Andrea (Helena Christensen) with whom he'd formed a passionate bond.

The break-up was enormously traumatic for Zetterstrom, who suffered a partial amnesia as a result of the event, avoided all emotional commitments, and threw himself totally into his work - rapidly becoming a world-renowned musician. The split also had wider ramifications, however: it somehow caused a small section of Copenhagen's old-town (a 372x88m piece of 'Gammelstan') to become, overnight, a near-impenetrable area known as 'The Zone,' a place existing outside the boundaries of normal time and space. At the invitation of the mysterious, avuncular Tom (Moritzen), Zetterstrom gains access to The Zone - and is forced to confront himself, his memories, and his guilt...

Just as, post-Star Wars, science fiction practitioners can't really get away with calling any form of mystical power 'The Force,' anyone labelling a closed-off, mystical area 'The Zone' is asking for major trouble. You can't hear those words without thinking of Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979, based on a novel by the Strugatsky brothers), and any film-maker willingly seeking such a comparison had better be close to the top of his game. That certainly isn't the case with Boe, who makes no bones about his debts to his elders and betters (his production company is even called 'Alphaville') but on this evidence has picked up only the worst habits of the auteurs (Tarkovsky, Godard, Bergman) to whom he's so obviously in thrall.

Though the picture is often visually strong (Manuel Alberto Claro handled the lush chiaroscuro cinematography), Boe's script - co-written with Mikael Wulff - is a pretentious mishmash of capitalised Grand Ideas: Art, Love, Life, Music, Memory, etc. Zetterstrom is almost a caricature of the artist-as-tormented-egotistical-loner - he prefers to play his concerts in the dark, hidden behind screens, with his audience blindfold (!) - whose inevitable crack-up is turned into a particularly arch kind of through-the-looking-glass adult fairytale.

'Guided' by the mocking, narratorial Tom (representing God? the Devil? Zetterstrom's father? His conscience? Boe himself?), Zetterstrom enters - by the rather Charlie Kaufmanish portal of a bar toilet - an anything-goes realm where reality and illusion rather clunkily interweave, entangled by his own insecurities, neuroses and psychoses. On escaping The Zone, Zetterstrom realises to his horror that he has left his 'talent' behind - in the ad hoc mythology of the picture, musical talent being in some manner an actual, physical property. Having been a Paderewski or a Brendel, Zetterstrom is now more of a Morecambe (Eric) or a Dawson (Les).

There's clearly the potential here for a more humorous approach - the bear-like Bro provides rare comic relief as the nervy, sweaty organiser of Zetterstrom's big comeback concert (Kaas fans must content themselves with a throwaway cameo) - but the prevailing tone is instead relentlessly, ostentatiously sombre. In her feature debut, supermodel Christensen flits in and out of the picture as the oh-so-enigmatic 'dark lady' - but she never becomes anything more than a kohl-eyed cipher, just another component in Boe's checklist of art-movie concomitants alongside the classical score (to give proceedings a veneer of seriousness), the intellectual-sounding dialogue (the Zone is a place "where infinity doesn't reach out into the universe, but into the self!"), the po-faced 'exploration' of Major Themes.

Pretty much everything is spelled out by Tom's narration, or illustrated by the recurring hand-drawn animations by Martin De Thurah - the latter easily the most charming, effective and memorable aspect of the whole overcooked enterprise. If only Boe could learn from De Thurah's light touch: instead he serves up clunkily nightmarish episodes such as a red-lit riverbank post-mortem Caesarean (distant shades of Don't Look Now, The Fourth Man and Daughters of Darkness?) The further it goes down such head-spinning dead ends, the more grating Allegro becomes - and as we reach the bathetically banal climax, the viewer may reckon that Boe has somehow had his 'talent' - the skill that saw him make such a splash with Reconstruction - surreptitiously purloined.

Neil Young

2nd October, 2006

ALLEGRO : [4/10] : Denmark 2005 : Christoffer BOE : 88 mins (BBFC timing)
seen at ICA cinema, London (UK), 8th September 2006 - press show
with thanks to Tim Robey

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