Film Review | “Allegro Pastell“
On the Impossibility of Committing Oneself

Self-reflective, detached, a little lethargic: Anna Roller adapts Leif Randt's generational portrait “Allegro Pastell” for the screen based on his screenplay.

By Philipp Bühler

How should one view Allegro Pastell? That is the incredibly tricky question posed by this film. As a professional critic, you find yourself in a Möbius strip. After all, Allegro Pastell, the underlying book by Leif Randt and now also the film, is primarily about evaluating things, people, feelings and even colours, but also about why we do so and whether that is all there is to life. After its publication in 2020, the novel was quickly hailed as a sensation, the cool love story between thirty-somethings Tanja and Jerome, the writer and the web designer, as a portrait of a generation. Hyper-reflective, lethargic to the point of arrogance, but also sensitive and mildly insecure – not only critics, but also many millennials recognised themselves in the two characters, or at least knew others who ticked exactly the same way.

The Tesla Is Missing

To put it mildly, Anna Roller's film adaptation (Dead Girls Dancing, 2023) is quite similar to the book, which, in Leif Randt's inimitable language, can be found “pleasant” or “quite” unsatisfactory. Tanja and Jerome enjoy their long-distance relationship between Berlin and Maintal near Frankfurt, the capital and the West German province, which is both exciting and easily manageable thanks to Deutsche Bahn. Sometimes they get carried away with “300% joy”, as can be seen from the text messages that appear on screen, while other quotes from the book are read aloud quite excessively over their narrative voices.

But of course, things cannot remain so pragmatic and harmonious. Other partners are tried out, and Jerome's well-considered design for Tanja's website played a role in this. The pastel colours – if you understand this to mean a certain paleness, then the term is accurate – now change to Aperol red from time to time, without changing the unquestionably contemporary look, which actually looks like it has been run through an Instagram filter. However, the mention of well-known brands has been significantly reduced. The now famous visit to the Berlin branch of the sporting goods chain Decathlon has been omitted, and Jerome no longer drives a Tesla, not even a rental.

Novelist = Screenwriter

The cast, featuring German cinema veteran Jannis Niewöhner and the relatively unknown French actress Sylvaine Faligant, comes as close to the characters as possible. How else could this eternally internalised view of oneself be portrayed? After all, Niewöhner has the “striking chin” that Tanja likes so much about her Jerome in the book (and which he likes to show off in selfies). The fact that the film does not really develop its own language certainly has something to do with the fact that Randt wrote the screenplay himself. The colourful author, himself born in 1983, will never tell us what drove him in his phenomenology of the zeitgeist: existentialist world-weariness, honest self-criticism or pure self-complacency? It probably all depends on the viewer.