Christoffer Boe, Allegro

Christoffer Boe’s second film, Allegro also deals with love and the problems that sometimes follow. It is not a typical romance film - far from it - but instead attempts to tackle those well-known issues in a different, more abstract or symbolic style.

Centering in on a classical pianist, it seems logical to read the title as referring to the musical tempo of allegro, but the film’s pace is far from quick and lively; being instead much slower and more deliberate. The story is relatively straight-forward. Zetterstrøm, the pianist, meets a girl, Andrea, one night after a concert and they fall in love. The encounter begins with Zetterstrøm (we never learn his first name) having forgotten his key, a simple mistake which causes him to meet the love of his life.

However, because he cannot fully trust that she loves him, he loses her and leaves Copenhagen and her behind. Although this is kept unclear, it seems that Andrea probably drowned herself when he could not trust that she loved him. Zetterstrøm has a meteoric career as a pianist all over the world, playing the piano flawlessly, though some say without passion. The price is that he has completely forgotten his previous life and this memory block causes a peculiar Zone to rise in Copenhagen, blocking people from the streets where Zetterstrøm lived and grew up. It is here that the film breaks from the standard fare of romance films, and introduces a foreign, inexplicable element. The citizens of Copenhagen accept the new peculiar area in their city. When Zetterstrøm is confronted with the loss of his memory, he returns to Copenhagen.

The film has a certain David Lynch-like quality in the unreal sequences which take place in the Zone, which we soon guess is a zone of Zetterstrøm’s memories, trapped here because he cast them aside. The plot of the film is that Zetterstrøm needs to learn to trust other people and accept his past as an integral and vital part of him. An old, handicapped man in a wheelchair is the one who helps him realize that trust - even when it leads to mistakes - is part of what it means to be human.

Allegro is no character study, as we learn very little about Zetterstrøm. Instead, it seems to me to be a meditation on the nature of being human. Zetterstrøm has reduced the human parts of himself in order to be the perfect pianist. He effaces all that is human from his performances: the audience must sit with blindfolds, while the stage is never lit; he never plays in front of people and he never makes a mistake. Yet, this is not what we want from our artists or even art in general. Perfection, something which is too flawless, seems to lack passion and becomes instead mechanical. One character even dares to question if it really is Zetterstrøm playing, as “one couldn’t possibly tell”.

As Zetterstrøm is reconciled with his past, and accepts that he cannot control everything, he plays the concert passionately in full view of the audience, though we are only told so by the film’s narrator. The point of the film is not that Zetterstrøm learns to become a better pianist, but instead that he learns to be a better human.

The film is not profound, as such, but rather intimate. Tom, the handicapped man who shows Zetterstrøm around the Zone, stresses the simple things in life as important rather than trivial; a nice lunch, a glass of good wine and most importantly, the relations between humans as deeply significant. He owns tons of books - “because they are our collective memories” - but discards them as too impersonal. Zetterstrøm’s playing is also too impersonal, because he has no memories and no past. Only by fully being who we are - which means remembering our past - can we mean something to others and so be important to them. Art can help us achieve this, which is why art, as a concretization of emotion, is so all-important.