Mamma Mia
PG, Nationwide
Mamma Mia has to be the most fun you can have with your clothes on. Or is it off? When you get to my age, it’s such a struggle to remember. Either way, though, if you are now expecting this review to be subtly and cleverly interweaved with punning ABBA song titles then you can just forget it. My, my, how can I resist it? Easily, my dears; easily. Or, as Bubbles says, ‘Gimme, gimme, gimme a man after midnight.’ Well, it just goes to show; you can live with someone for years and years and years and still not know everything about them.
Anyway, this is the film adaptation of the stage musical, which has already been seen by 30 million people in 160 cities across the world and proves what I have said all along or, if you are going to quibble, then at least since I was three: take those supremely catchy ABBA hits, construct the loosest of loose narratives around them, shake it all up with lashings of enthusiasm and just the right amount of cheesy, cheeky self-awareness and voilà! There’s your global smash. I do wish people would listen to me. It is very irritating, you know. And we could all have made a truckload of ‘Money, Money, Money’, which is always handy, it being a rich man’s world. (Sorry; won’t happen again.)
This loosest of loose narratives concerns Donna (Lady Meryl of Streep), who runs a small hotel on a small Greek island and has a daughter, Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), who is 20, about to get married, and wants her father to walk her down the aisle. Trouble is, who is her father? She’s never been told. So she reads her mother’s diary from that time and secretly invites the three men who, 20 years earlier, each enjoyed a ‘romantic encounter’ with her.
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