Once upon a time in Copenhagen, a narrator tells us while images in Christoffer Boe’s new film “Allegro” show us, a child piano prodigy-turned-famed concert pianist named Zetterstrom (Ulrich Thomsen) met a woman named Andrea on the stoop of his apartment. Andrea, wasn’t just a world-class beauty on the order of, say, Helena Christensen, the supermodel who plays her in “Allegro” — she was Zetterstrom’s potential soul mate.

Though he falls for her and she for him, for reasons it would apparently be anti-romantic in a fable of this kind to spell out, Andrea leaves Zetterstrom without warning. Devastated, the pianist returns to the state he was in before he met Andrea, that of an artist willing to forsake the messier and arguably finer emotional and experiential things in life in favor of monastic artistic perfection.

Like generations of create-aholics before him, Zetterstrom retreats to the narcissistic-musician and emotional-amnesiac capital of the world, New York City. The combination of his will to move on, his affliction with a reverse-Peter Pan syndrome in which maturity is defined by how little fun you have, and his hectic touring schedule do the job perfectly. When Zetterstrom returns to Copenhagen for his first hometown performance in a decade, he barely even remembers his own agent, let alone the swan dive his heart took when Andrea left with barely a word.

The town itself has undergone its own transformation. For an indeterminate part of the decade that Zetterstrom has been abroad, the pianist’s old Copenhagen neighborhood has been sealed off from the rest of the city (and the world) by an undefined but no less impenetrable force-field phenomenon. No one knows exactly what goes on inside “The Zone,” as the area has been renamed, because no one goes in or out.

But in science fiction, as in life, it’s who you know, or rather who knows you. Tom (Henning Moritzen), the film’s narrator, reaches out to Zetterstrom and tells him how to breach the Zone. By entering the right ladies room stall in the right café at the right time, the pianist penetrates the barrier, and in doing so gives the rules of time and space (within a 10-year and 15-block or so radius) the brush-off. Reintroduced to Andrea, or her image, or her memory, or her twin, or something, Zetterstrom begins the process of getting his decade’s worth of painful memories back, and with them the chance to become a more soulful artist and a better human being.

“Allegro” deserves credit for taking the 1970s science-fiction high road and not indulging in too many explanations. But as the film’s logic springs leaks and no answers or epiphanies or anything particularly engaging are provided to plug them, what initially appear to be tantalizingly unanswered riddles wind up being questions that should have been addressed when “Allegro” was still a script.

Mr. Boe’s goulash of ideas and themes — from Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Stalker,” Godard’s “Alphaville,” and any Wong Kar-Wai movie since “Days of Being Wild” — can only keep his characters and concepts floating in a murky womb of gestating auguries for so long. Eventually, the film’s mumbled talking points about memory and art and “the infinity inside the self” begin to repeat instead of rise, and portentousness takes a back seat to pretentiousness.

Mr. Boe has said that his intention in making “Allegro” was to arrange a meeting of “Stalker” (Tarkovsky’s 1979 film about a similar kind of “zone”) and “Gigi” (Vincente Minnelli’s frothy 1958 musical about platonic love that may not be). But “Allegro,” shot almost entirely in nervous hand-held close-ups that zoom into even tighter nervous hand-held close-ups, has very little of the brooding visual poetry that made Tarkovsky’s often impenetrable passages scenic at the very least. And unlike “Gigi,” Mr. Boe’s film has almost no discernable sense of humor.

There’s nothing wrong with ripping off Tarkovsky, or Minnelli, or Mr. Wong, or anybody for that matter, though I would welcome a one-year moratorium on filmmakers reheating Terrence Malick and Martin Scorsese’s stylistic leftovers (especially Messrs. Malick and Mr. Scorsese). But with more than it can clearly communicate on its mind, and not very much genuine sentiment at its core, “Allegro” feels less like a film that capitalizes on influences and more like an overheard, one-sided conversation between a novice director and his heroes.

Through May 16 (155 E. 3rd St., between avenues A and B, 212-254-3300).