Norway’s most successful musical export ever get the respectful bio-documentary treatment in A-ha: The Movie, a title that winkingly references a previous kitsch classic of Scandi-pop cinema, Abba: The Movie (1979). Co-directed by Thomas Robsahm, whose prestigious portfolio of producer credits includes current Norwegian Oscar contender The Worst Person in the World, this career-spanning film retraces the Oslo trio’s journey from all-conquering Nordic synth-pop boy-band in the Eighties to arena-filling elder statesmen today. Blending archive material with recently shot studio and tour footage, Robsahm and Aslaug Holm briskly cover four decades of hits and splits, comebacks and break-ups, killer cheekbones and terrible trousers.
A-ha: The Movie features extensive soul-searching interviews in both English and Norwegian with the three band members Morten Harket, Magne Furuholmen and Pål Waaktaar-Savoy, punctuated by commentary from wives and partners, managers and collaborators. This fairly conventional and earnest approach, emotionally frank but mostly unrevealing about any wider hinterland outside the band, is unlikely to win the trio many new converts. But it should generate healthy interest based on their enduring popularity, with 50 million album sales and counting. Premiered in Tribeca last year and screened at Dublin film festival last week, it arrives at Glasgow film festival this week ahead of wider commercial release in April and May.
Robsahm calls A-ha “the most underrated band in the history of pop”. Which is highly arguable, but they are clearly more than a novelty nostalgia act, still playing to huge crowds and earning respect from younger artists like Coldplay and Liam Gallagher. The streak of Nordic melancholy running through their songs has helped them endure beyond fickle pop-idol fame, and film finds them teasing out new emotional depths from their classic hits on their 2017 acoustic album MTV Unplugged. A major sex symbol in his Eighties prime, the 62-year-old Harket remains a strikingly handsome figure, his vulpine beauty only slightly softened by the ravages of age. Sporting aviator sunglasses and leather jacket, the singer looks unnervingly like David Hasselhoff at times, but the passing years have added rich new layers to his crystalline choirboy falsetto.
The film’s pre-fame section is the most interesting, largely because it features previously unseen personal archive material. Using a collage of vintage stills, early recordings and spare animated sequences that cleverly reference director Steve Barron’s iconic rotoscope video for the band’s breakthrough hit Take On Me, Robsahm and Holm revisit the trio’s unlikely origin story as voraciously ambitious pop-star wannabes in late Seventies Oslo, presented here as a remote musical backwater of comical haircuts and quaint dance-hall bands.
Minor local success is followed by make-or-break relocation to London, where the trio initially struggle with poverty and rejection. Eventually they find sympathetic managers and producers, and sign a major label deal. After two failed early releases, a re-recorded Take On Me finally propels them to international fame, topping the US singles charts and reaching Number Two in the UK in 1985. The song’s parent album, Hunting High and Low, goes on to sell 11 million copies. The band’s hit-packed imperial phase includes scoring the title song to James Bond movie The Living Daylights (1987), world tours and record-breaking stadium shows, before commercial decline hastens their first sabbatical and various solo projects in the mid Nineties.
Most behind-the-scenes music documentaries thrive on tension, of course, not frictionless ascent to superstar fame. Robsahm and Haug uncover very little juicy material to work with here, but find a modicum of psychodrama when the cracks in A-ha begin to appear in the Nineties, with their hits drying up and long-standing resentments bubbling to the surface. Like almost every other successful band in history, the trio have had their battles over creative control, songwriting credits and the unequal financial rewards that flow from them.
The uncompromising Waaktaar-Savoy has always been A-ha’s driving force and principal composer, dismissing Furuholmen’s contributions as cosmetic tweaks, which he cruelly likens in the film to rearranging items on a table. As a consequence, the pair have unresolved tensions in later life, with Furuholmen blaming his heightened anxiety and recurring cardiac problems on band politics. He even appears to shun plans to record another A-ha album, fearing it will be a “hornet’s nest”.
These low-level tensions provide A-ha: The Movie with a degree of emotional bite. There is, after all, a certain universal poignancy in seeing former close childhood friends growing apart in middle age. But in truth, these routine fractures seem pretty trivial. Robsahm and Haug do not mention it but the band plan to release a new album later this year, which suggests their disagreements are hardly insurmountable. In a dark period of plague and war, the minor problems of three wealthy pop musicians do not really add up to a hill of beans. All the same, this is a thoughtful, occasionally moving film about a phenomenally successful band whose musical bond has outlived their personal chemistry.
Directors: Thomas Robsahm, Aslaug Holm
Cinematography: Aslaug Holm
Editing: Hilde Bjørnstad
Producers: Yngve Saether, Thomas Robsahm
Production companies: Motlys AS (Norway), Neue Impuls Film Produktionsgesellschaft (Germany), Kinescope Film (Germany), Fenris Film (Norway)
World sales: First Hand Films, Zurich
In English, Norwegian
107 minutes
