A-ha: The Movie

★★★ Dir: Thomas Robsahm MODERN FILMS. C/ST

Norwegian pop heroes hunt high and low for the bright side. “We let ourselves be photographed in the most humiliating settings,” says A-ha’s keyboardist Magne Furuholmen, reflecting on the intense fame that followed 1985’s global hit Take On Me. The Oslo trio never craved teen adoration, their early love of Uriah Heep and Queen broadening into The Velvet Underground and – after a grotty stint in early-’80s London

– The Batcave and Soft Cell (singer Morten Harket went through a phase of replacing hairspray with house paint.) This slightly sour documentary highlights other faultlines – creative differences, old resentments, recurrent stalemates – while John Barry found them so unyielding on James Bond theme The Living Daylights he called them “Nazi Jugend”. If the Take On Me video turned them into a cartoon band, here A-ha are oddly unanimated, leaving the bleak impression that 50 million sales and an enduring career haven’t stopped the feeling that something, somewhere, went awry.