A scarecrow flies through the air, witches hold a sabbath, and mouths form in the mist in this shadowy early animation that inspired the famous Fantasia sequence; Alexeieff would reprise the same pinscreen animation technique for a segment in The Trial.
Tag Archives: Classical Music
IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: ALLEGRO (2005)
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DIRECTED BY: Christoffer Boe
FEATURING: Ulrich Thomsen, Helena Christensen, Henning Moritzen
PLOT: An acclaimed pianist returns to Copenhagen in response to the appearance of an impassable no-man’s land that was created when the musician broke up with his girlfriend a decade prior.
COMMENTS: Allegro is a musical term, an instruction to performers to maintain a fast and bright tempo in the range of 120-156 beats per minute. The first movement of Vivaldi’s “Spring” is allegro, as is “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” by Mozart. (Also at allegro tempo: this.) It establishes a bright, bouncy feel, and while allegro tunes don’t have to be happy, there’s something wickedly perverse about lending the term to the title of this slow, methodical look at a musical artist who has removed all flair and personality from his performances, and indeed from himself. Surely “Adagio” was sitting right there.
Writer/director Boe hints at the outset that we’re about to be treated to a modern fairy tale. Through recurring sketchbook-style animation, we learn about the early life of our hero, an aspiring concert pianist we will only know by his last name, Zetterstrøm, who grows up to become a technically perfect but emotionally flat musician. This seems like it might change when he has a charming meet-cute with a lovely woman named Andrea. They progress to a relationship, despite his clear reservations, and his wariness seems justified when they break up a while later because of his commitment to his career. Leaving Andrea behind, he becomes a performer whose interpretations hit all their marks perfectly but are devoid of emotional engagement. He is so completely devoted to the purity of his work and so determined to extricate any trace of personality that he does Glenn Gould one better by refusing to be seen as he performs. As one music expert tells us, “He is an excellent pianist, technically… but where is his passion?”
Turns out his passion is in Denmark. I mean, that’s literally where he has deposited all of the distracting impulses that he has purged from his system because they harsh his chill. What Zetterstrøm has done, unbeknownst to him, is compartmentalize all his memories and feelings of the intense relationship into a section of Copenhagen that becomes a closed-off, inaccessible disaster area called “The Zone.” (Locals bounce things off the invisible force field that surrounds The Zone for their amusement.) In short, Allegro is a clever piece of magical realism, making manifest the consequences of locking one’s emotions away.
The idea is compelling when described, but less so in execution. The premise is fantastical, but Boe is so committed to the reality of the situation that he devotes much time to the uninteresting business of getting Zetterstrøm to Copenhagen, getting him into The Zone, and finally getting him to understand the implications of his careless soul-ectomy. Yes, Zetterstrøm has intentionally extracted his heartbroken soul, but as played by Thomsen, he’s a pretty emotionally vacant fellow already. It ends up feeling like the function is following the form, and that rather than exploring this broken psyche by viewing it through the prism of an “Outer Limits”-style no-man’s land, Allegro seems to have come up with the strange storytelling twist and retrofitted a story to occupy it.
It is frustrating how much of Allegro is told and not shown. Zetterstrøm is spoon-fed every clue to unlock his stolen past by Moritzen’s ill-defined narrator/journalist/ringmaster, like the minder overseeing an escape room. Zetterstrøm’s performing ability is delivered to us second-hand. His relationship with Andrea is conveyed quickly through a crafty piece of editing that takes the couple’s relationship from its earliest moments to its sad end, but the technique denies us the opportunity to see the relationship for ourselves. Most tellingly, the film’s final revelation resolving the ramifications of his experience in The Zone, tying together the pianist’s emotional turmoil and his professional acumen, is delivered in voiceover.
Allegro goes hard on its unusual premise, and there are some intriguing camera and set design choices that reflect the scattered and troubled nature of Zetterstrøm’s memories. It’s also to the film’s credit that we invest in his relationship with Andrea (the film debut for former supermodel Christensen) despite how little we see of it. Ultimately, however, an appropriately weird idea does not alone make a weird film, and Allegro never quite makes good on what it promises. Contrary to its title, Allegro doesn’t go fast, and it doesn’t get where it wants to go.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by Gustaf Ottosson. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
I think this movie is weirder than average
I think this movie is better than average
CAPSULE: THIRTY TWO SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD (1993)
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DIRECTED BY: François Girard
FEATURING: Colm Feore
PLOT: A patchwork of short vignettes explores the allure of the eccentric piano virtuoso.
COMMENTS: I discovered my all-time favorite recording, Glenn Gould’s complete “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” and François Girard’s Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould at about the same time. I can’t definitively remember which I encountered first: my guess would be Girard’s film, because it is such an effective advertisement for Gould’s genius that it seems likely to have inspired a purchase. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that I saw there was a film out about this marvelous pianist who accompanied his nimble fingers with ecstatic spontaneous humming, breathing humanity into Bach’s precise baroque miniatures, and knew I had to learn more about this man. I do know that Gould’s “Clavier” was reissued in on CD in 1993, likely to coincide with this film, and I love to imagine I actually picked up that set from Tower Records and rented a VHS of Thirty Two Films from my local mom and pop video store on the same weekend in 1993 or 1994.
The movie does what it says on the tin (although some might object to calling the closing credits a “short film.”) The sequences break down into four main categories: documentary-style interviews with friends and co-workers, dramatic reenactments of events in the pianist’s life, adaptations of Gould’s own works, and abstract experimental sketches. The interviews are illuminating, and give the film its hybrid documentary character. The dramatic scenes form the bulk of the movie. They follow in a roughly chronological format, but do not tell a continuing story: each is a standalone vignette. Memorable moments show Gould corralling his hotel chambermaid to listen to his hot-off-the-presses LP and the Gould mesmerized by contrapuntal conversations he hears in a diner. A performance of “String Quartet, Opus 1,” one of his few original compositions, an excerpt from the word collage “The Idea of North,” and a dramatization of a portion of his puckish essay “Glenn Gould Interviews Glenn Gould About Glenn Gould” ground us in the legend’s actual creative output. The experimental shorts constitute the most intriguing category, although there are only five or six of them (considering how you count). They include closeups of Gould’s own CD318 piano in action, hammers striking the soundboard, illustrating the physical geometry of the sonic construction; a scene of Gould playing the piano in x-ray vision; and “Gould Meets McLaren,” a 1969 animated short (originally entitled “Spheres”) that shows globes popping into existence, dancing symmetrically across the screen, and dividing like eggs undergoing musical mitosis as Gould plays a Bach fugue.
I once defined bopic as “a movie genre that’s not accurate enough to be documentary or interesting enough to be fiction.” One of the most formulaic and cliched film formats, the celebrity biography only really works when it is heavily fictionalized, as in Amadeus or Lisztomania (which, coincidentally, both involve classical musicians). Thirty Two Short Films shatters the mold of this generally insipid movie genre. There are enough talking head reminiscences to capture the spirit of the man, but not so many that it appears lazy. Girard solves the genre’s central problem—the fact that messy human lives rarely fit neatly into three act structures with unified themes—by ignoring narrative almost entirely. This collage portraiture method captures its subject more faithfully than a “realist” approach would. When we think back on people we know, we recall them as a collection of moments and characteristics; we don’t think of them as a contiguous life story. Glenn Gould was the piano prodigy and the hypochondriac and the man who went everywhere wrapped in a coat and gloves and scarf and the man who called up his friends late at night and talked their ears off and the virtuoso who developed a hatred for performing and the monster who put ketchup on his eggs and the genius and the possibly asexual hermit. He is at least thirty two separate stories, and this seemingly chaotic collection of vignettes creates a portrait of a real person far better than a tick-tock chronology or a forced storyline would. Plus, the music is, naturally, great, and what Gould himself likely would have wanted us to focus on; his passion shines through every segment, turning almost anyone into a classical music fan for at least 90 minutes. Glenn Gould is a strong contender for the greatest biopic ever made.
Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould entered the Criterion Collection in June 2025 on 4K UHD and Blu-ray. Of course it is a new 4K director approved transfer. Of course it comes with a booklet (a nice fold out broadsheet with titles and scenes from the shorts on the other side) with an informative essay (from Michael Koresky.) Of course it has a director’s commentary (Girard is joined by co-writer Don McKellar). Other extras include a thirty minute conversation between Girard and fellow Canadian director Atom Egoyan, archival interviews with star Colm Feore and producer Niv Fichman, and a two part 1959 television portrait called “Glenn Gould: Off the Record” and “Glenn Gould: On the Record.”
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
[(This movie was nominated for review, without further comment, by “Anonymous.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
![Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (The Criterion Collection) [4K UHD]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51LMZHo75bL._SL500_.jpg)
SATURDAY SHORT: L’HEURE BLEUE (2023)
In the tradition of Fantasia and Allegro non Troppo, animators illustrate a concert performance of Holst’s “Neptune, the Mystic”; crabs scuttle over a violin and a skeletal hand scratches a hole in the sky.
CAPSULES: THE TALES OF HOFFMAN (1951)
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DIRECTED BY: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
FEATURING: Robert Rounseville, Robert Helpmann, Pamela Brown, Moria Shearer, Leonide Massine, Ludmilla Tcherina, Ann Ayars
PLOT: During the intermission of a ballet, the poet Hoffman tells a drinking party stories of three women whom he has loved and lost: an automaton, a courtesan, and an ailing singer.
COMMENTS: Hoffman is a layer-cake of high art contributions: starting with Jacques Offenbach’s opera “Tales of Hoffman,” edited and altered to fit the running time and the producer’s fancies, with the libretto translated into English for the first time, adding an entirely new ballet scene and requiring extensive choreography for the rest of the acts, staged on lavish sets designed by unsung hero Hein Heckroth, and ultimately delivered through the medium of cinema and a magical camera. Offenbach’s final opus, completed only months before the composer’s death in 1819, seems an unlikely candidate for the most lavish cinematic opera ever filmed. Unlike the major works of Wagner, Mozart, or Bizet, it contains no well-known arias or overtures. What it does offer is a number of evocative scene-changes through a variety of romantic locales, which was what likely attracted Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (known, together with their customary production team, as “the Archers”) to the project.
Robert Rounseville makes for a bland Hoffmann; he was cast primarily because he played the part on stage, but in his defense he was one of the only actors to sing his own part (most were dubbed and performed while lip-syncing). Lithe ballerina Moria Shearer (from The Red Shoes) takes the spotlight for two top-notch dances, as the sinuous female dragonfly in the opening ballet and in a comic mode as the stiff automaton. With his expressive eyes and even more expressive eyebrows, Robert Helpmann snakes through the stories (and steals every scene) as Hoffman’s eternally recurring Satanic antagonist; a former dancer and choreographer, he performs no grand jeté‘s here, but always moves purposefully and gracefully. It’s fair to say he is the film’s onscreen star: usually, the actors are hardly more significant than the custom-built marionettes.
The sets, dances, wardrobes, and optics drive the experience, not the actors or narrative. Hoffman tours four major settings—the lily pad lake where the dragonflies perform their mating dance; the workshop of the automaton-maker, peopled with marionettes; the decadent Venice of courtesans; the classical marble halls of the singer’s villa on a remote Greek island—in addition to several minor sets (like the beer hall). Each has its own dominant color scheme: green for the dragonflies, yellow for the living dolls, red for the gondolas and bordellos of Venice, and blue for the Greek island. The Continue reading CAPSULES: THE TALES OF HOFFMAN (1951)