Allegro

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Christoffer Boe's Allegro (available to UK site users) is a drama from 2005 which encompasses science fiction elements within its narrative. The story centres on emotionally isolated piano virtuoso Zetterstrøm, who returns to his native Copenhagen after a decade's absence. Having walked out on life in his home city following his break-up with the luminous Andrea, effectively cutting all emotional ties with his past as he did so, Zetterstrøm is now startled to find himself the centre of an intrigue involving an enigmatic patron named Tom and a mission into the mysterious 'Zone' in the heart of the Danish capital, where the regular laws of causality undergo bewitching amendment.

Allegro is the second feature from Danish director Boe, following his well-received debut Reconstruction, and the film finds the writer-director commanding a starry cast. Supermodel Helena Christensen takes on her first major acting role, as Zetterstrøm's erstwhile love Andrea, while the roles of the central pianist protagonist and narrator/benefactor are filled by Ulrich Thomsen and Henning Moritzen, who respectively played accuser son and demonic patriarch in Thomas Vinterberg's Festen.

Despite this latter bit of casting, and the long shadow cast over Danish film-making by the Dogme 95 movement, when interviewed by Green Cine in 2006 Boe was quick to dismiss the famous film-making doctrine drawn up by Vinterberg and Lars von Trier as a possible influence, instead citing a Russian and two Frenchmen as having a far more significant bearing on his work: “The great influence of all I'm doing is perhaps Tarkovsky; definitely Leos Carax with his poetic, bigger-than-life scenery about love; but also Godard.” The touch of the latter is immediately visible in the naming of Boe's production company, Alphaville, christened in honour of Godard's 1965 future noir, while the Dane has also often cited the Carax-directed Boy Meets Girl as a major inspiration for him.

But it is Solaris film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky whose work is most obviously quoted in Allegro, with the time and space warping 'Zone' into which Zetterstrøm ventures having a direct equivalent in Tarkovsky's 1979 science fiction Stalker. In that earlier movie the 'Zone' is a forbidden wilderness, only negotiable with the aid of a special guide (the eponymous Stalker), and at the centre of which is said to be a room in which the fondest desires can be realised. Boe admitted to Twitch that the naming of the nebulous sector of Copenhagen in his movie was a wholly deliberate homage to the legendary Russian director: “Tarkovsky has made the two greatest science fiction movies of all time. So I needed to make that sort of reference, to say, 'Thank you, Mr. Tarkovsky, you're the greatest.'”

Boe clearly shares with Tarkovsky the view that science fiction can function as a highly flexible means of exploring human psychology, as opposed to the prevailing movie studio view of it as an excuse for two-dimensional lantern-jawed heroes to zip around on space-bikes, exchanging laser-beam fire with dome-headed Martian tyrants. Musing on the genre in an interview with Filmmaker magazine, Boe suggested, “for me, science fiction is not about gadgets, it's the big 'what if?' question” - a point which he expanded upon with Twitch, in direct reference to the subject matter of Allegro: “The great 'what if' is basically that Copenhagen seems to be able to remember things that you, or at least this guy in the movie, forget... basically [Allegro is] a love story, science fiction, and it's a sort of triangle between a woman and a man and Copenhagen.”

Allegro focuses on Zetterstrøm's quest to reclaim the past he turned away from ten years previously, but it is also an elegy for the ephemeral tenderness that was lost when his and Andrea's intense relationship ended. As Boe explained to Green Cine, “Allegro is very much about someone who is not accepting the revolutionary quality of love, that he's not willing to change his life. He's not willing to accept all the flaws and the losses and the mistakes that are going to come when you invite another human being into your life.” In order to force him into confronting the emotions bound up in his memories, mystery man Tom plays a Kaufmanesque trick on the insular Zetterstrøm, convincing the pianist that he has extracted his musical talent from his body. The allegiance and true nature of Tom is a murky matter though, with him seeming every bit as mischievous and capricious as he is courteous and avuncular.

Allegro was in competition in the World Cinema Dramatic category of the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, where it eventually lost out to Géla Babluani's 13 Tzameti. This may have been a blessing in disguise for Boe though, because while Georgian film-maker Babluani has fallen down the Hollywood rabbit hole of being hired to remake his own movie in English (with the “Grr! We're real men!” likes of Mickey Rourke, Jason Statham, Ray Liotta and 50 Cent in the cast), the Danish director has been able to forge ahead and deliver a further two features since - 2006's Offscreen, and the thriller Everything Will Be Fine, which was released in January in Denmark and played at Cannes 2010 as part of Director's Fortnight.