The Movie shows how the three Norwegians remain loyal to each other in a resentful way ★★★★☆

When the Norwegian youngsters Pål Waaktaar and Magne Furuholmen, equally ambitious and unsuccessful, fused a few rough musical ideas into a song in early 1984. Take On Me was going to be called, they couldn’t possibly know two things.

The first: they had just written the song that would become their Warner debut and (a year and a half and a few edits later) a worldwide hit for eternity, featuring a classic video clip animated in the form of moving pencil sketches of Steve Barron.

The second: unknowingly, during the writing process, they sowed the seeds for the conflict that would make their relationship complicated and explosive forever and now, some 37 years later, they run like a thread through A-ha: The Movie runs. After a short year of corona delay, the documentary will finally have its Dutch premiere during In-Edit, the Amsterdam festival for music documentaries.

The key question: how important is a recognizable keyboard run? And the follow-up question: is the creator of such a walk a full-fledged co-author of the song or did he just color it in a bit?

In the documentary by Thomas Robsahm and Áslaug Holm, A-ha’s most important songwriter Pål Waaktaar compares Take On Me with a wooden table. He built the thing, period. The question is: did Furuholmen add his feet with his keyboard run (‘then you deserve some of the credits’) or just ‘a decoration’ or ‘a bunch of flowers’? Watchtar keeps it to the last; Furuholmen on (at least) the first.

The early oeuvre of A-ha, the most successful band that Norway produced, has quite a few ‘tables’, with the bitter differences of opinion about what legs are and what ornaments they entail.

It explains why Waaktaar, Furuholmen and singer and eye-catcher Morten Harket, now almost 60 or something past, more than 35 years after their breakthrough, are still driven from hotel to hall in three separate cars. Why Furuholmen temporarily left the band in the mid-nineties and is walking around with a stress-related heart condition. Why the recordings of a new album always start with ‘a couple of honeymoon weeks’, after which the tension steadily rises towards the boiling point, due to the old sore.

Lauren Savoy, Pål’s American wife (his official name is Paul Waaktaar-Savoy for years): ‘They need a psychiatrist. First all three individually, then together, as a band.’

Regular photographer Just Loomis: ‘I have to bring three guys together who sometimes don’t want to be together at all. You can see that in photos.’

They discuss each other in separately recorded interviews with aloof respect, the three men of A-ha, but they can hardly suppress their small and big annoyances.

Paul Waaktaar-Savoy: ‘I was the band leader in the eighties.’

Magne Furuholmen: ‘We didn’t have a band leader in the eighties.’

Morten Harket: ‘Paul has a tendency to get his way.’

Pop documentaries are experiencing a heyday, both quantitatively and qualitatively. They are running more than ever in cinemas large or small (A-ha: The Movie also, from April 28), can be seen at documentary festivals such as IDFA and In-Edit, and are offered en masse (both older and new titles) across the streaming platforms, from Netflix to Disney+ and the new HBO Max.

A-ha: The Movie belongs to a spicy subgenre, which offers an insight into mutual quarrels and tensions, so that as a viewer you start to feel like a voyeur and you sometimes wonder why the portrayed artists gave a director permission to hang their dirty laundry out so pontifically.

A classic in that category is Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (2004), in which the largest metal band in the world goes into group therapy to get the totally stalled mutual communication going again. Even Metallica haters developed sympathy for the suddenly endearing megaband. Also unforgettable: Promises and Lies: The Story of UB40 (2016), about the hugely popular British reggae formation that split into two rival UB40s due to howling fights.

Why A-ha opened the door for filmmakers Thomas Robsahm and Áslaug Holm, even if they knew that the mutual chill would not be hidden from the viewer, is fairly easy to guess.

Despite everything, they are also loyal to each other in a resentful way. Their story is beautiful: three boys from the slick suburbia of Oslo move to London in 1982, barely 20 years old, to immerse themselves in the music scene and risk everything for a career in pop music.

For years they achieve nothing, until they have to live out of poverty on porridge and ‘moldy pie’, celebrating rejections as harbingers of the inevitable breakthrough. And then beats Take On Me in, in the third instance only. Number 1 on the US Billboard Hot 100 – world fame as sudden as it is overwhelming for A-ha.

At the beginning of their narration, filmmakers Robsahm and Holm make artful use of pencil animations in the style of the Take On Me-video clip. They subtly expose a second storyline, which remains more veiled than the one about the mutual quarrels: the story of Waaktaar’s palpable frustration about the fact that A-ha becomes a different band in practice than he had in mind.

He says that at the time of his first band Bridges he was inspired by The Doors, Uriah Heep and Queen. Later, when he and Magne form a trio, he admires The Velvet Underground, Joy Division and Echo & The Bunnymen. In their destitute London years, they marvel at the clubs in Camden Town at Soft Cell and The Human League, synthesizer bands that decisively influence A-ha. A-ha wants to belong to that world.

But they become something else, if only because the group with Morten Harket has a heavenly handsome poster boy in the ranks, who does not sing raw but rather behaves, like a nightingale with a preference for the high registers. Harket becomes a girl idol and A-ha therefore, willy-nilly, becomes a sort of boy band.

Several times they try to change that image, by putting on the album Scoundrel Days (1986) opt for less accessible new wave (‘that cost us America’) and on East of the Sun, West of the Moon (1990), rather forced, for expansive rock like U2 op The Joshua Tree†

Between those two albums, A-ha allows herself to be seduced by the record label into commercial teenage pop again, with the colorful clothing, video clips and photos that you imagine. Waaktaar speaks the title of a feather-light hit as touchy! (1988) with undisguised horror.

A-ha is still much bigger than we realize in the Netherlands. In Norway, just about everything they release shoots to the top spots of hit and album charts. In Scandinavia and the German-speaking countries Foot of the Mountain (2009) as a glorious comeback hit, although they almost killed each other composing it. Remarkably successful in the Netherlands: Cast in Steelthe 2015 comeback album.

In the Netherlands it was done with hit success after 1990, but here too they fill the large hall that was formerly called Heineken Music Hall and now Afas Live once every few years. Worldwide album sales: at least 50 million units.

Why does A-ha face the annoyances and bitterness time and time again, and yet the band again ventures an album and a tour? Waaktaar sticks to ‘respect for each other’s talent’. Furuholmen points out that they had a musical click rather than a personal one and that the musical has always remained the most important.

We, as viewers, know when the credits are running what the real answer to the question is. Love, in spite of everything. A deep will to be A-ha together and to stay for a while. Don’t let them hear it, but that conclusion seeping through the resentment is the great credit of A-ha: The Movie†