FILM critics gave Mamma Mia! a rather stingy clutch of ratings at the weekend (including a damning one-star review in The Scotsman). I ask you: where is their sense of fun, life, happiness? Or, indeed: where is their sense, full stop?
Here we are
, trapped in rainy Britain with the credit crunch, Gordon Brown's via dolorosa and the strong euro putting up the cost of our summer holidays. Surely the very least that we are entitled to is a rollicking, daft, thoroughly uplifting couple of hours in a cinema?
One of the great talents of Abba was their ability to provide timeless mood songs, woven out of very ordinary tableaux of everyday life: the casual exuberance of a teenager dancing; a cash-strapped woman dreaming of marrying to gain money; the stilted conversation at the end of a relationship. I fell for them in at the age of eight when they emerged from behind a pot plant to conquer the Eurovision Song Contest with Waterloo. It has been an affair of more than 30 years' duration and unlikely to end any time soon.
Like a lot of stringent Abbaphiles, I had initial doubts about the play of Mamma Mia! The songs are so carefully put together to tell self-contained stories of their own that stringing them into a script seemed forced. But I'm won over, and the film clinches it.
You don't have to so much suspend disbelief as hang it from the rafters to swallow this plot: a girl luring her mother's three lovers of one summer to a Greek island so that she can work out which one is her father before her own wedding.
All this is camped up to the platform-booted max. It takes quite something to make the West End stage production of Mamma Mia! look restrained, but this lot do. Do they overact? Like billy-oh – this is Hollywood pantomime.
"Ooh, it's so Greek," mutters Julie Walters, wearing what looks like the worst outfits ever stocked by British Home Stores, as yet another cod-Greek chorus bursts onto the screen to comment in song on the action.
As for Meryl Streep: give that woman (another) Oscar. She can really sing (unlike her love interest, Pierce Brosnan, who has a great voice for silent films). It's Streep who gives real heart to the story, which is in essence about women and ageing. This is the anti-Botox movie. Streep's own wrinkles aren't concealed, her hair straggles and, with the exception of an Agnetha costume, she rarely gets to wear anything more glamorous than dungarees and cotton prints.
For all its farce and giggliness, Mamma Mia! has a sure touch about the mores of a time. Donna has enjoyed her summer of sexual liberation (don't inquire too closely into the dates: it means you have to imagine Colin Firth being in a punk band) and ended up struggling to raise a child alone.
If there is a more joyous and heart-teasing five minutes in film this year than Streep leading her friends through a reprise of their rocking years to the extended and brilliantly put together Dancing Queen sequence, then bring it on – though I doubt you can.
"We murder to dissect," said Wordsworth of something else entirely. But it is worth pausing to think why Abba's music has the power to persist and now conquer the screen as well as the stage. One reason is their utter self-confidence in their craft. Benny and Bjorn never compromised on a lyric or wrote a lazy line even when they were having a bit of trouble with the English language.
Abba is also a rare thing in very popular pop, in that it is unashamedly European. All the main scenes are from European cities: "I was sick and tired of everything/When I called you last night from Glasgow." Our Last Summer is set by the Seine. They evoke a kind of pan-European identity the EU can never match.
Yes, they wander off to seek inspiration in Latin America at the end of their career (see Chiquitita) but they still sound like Social Democrat political tourists rather than hot-blooded Mexican revolutionaries.
A thousand imitation bands have donned the glittery jackets but no-one has ever written a successful Abba tribute song of their own. The quirks of the words and the attention to the musical detail make it impervious to forgery.
Ordinary people are in the grip of extraordinary emotions – jealousy, regret – but it is all rooted in the tableaux of everyday life. In Our Last Summer, the ex-lover is "working in a bank/a family man, a football fan" named Harry.
The knowing streak of seasoned feminist awareness means Abba are never just ingénues.Yet they celebrate innocence just as naturally.
These are songs to make you cry and smile, often both at the same time.
So here we go again, and who can blame us? Laconic old Bjorn, when asked whether he was surprised that Mamma Mia! had run for so long, replied: "I have to say, I'd be surprised if it stopped."
Me too.
The full article contains 870 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
