Between a true crime and a sports documentary, it needed a bit of popular culture to complete the Netflix offer, which is currently not bloated in this area. And to do this, there is hardly a more unifying group than a group of girls from the 1980s. This one has the particularity of still making weddings dance and, above all, of having been the incubator of one of the most beautiful voices from the 1980s and 1990s. To restore the image of Wham! and remembering that it was not a boy band, the platform employs one of its “in-house” documentarians, Chris Smith (Tiger King, The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann). Not really enough to reassure, but the result is a little above expectations, without being close to the heights either.
Firstly because it is based on archives little seen until now, punctuated by scrapbooks (albums combining photos and press clippings) compiled by the mother of Andrew Ridgeley, second half of Wham! with George Michael, and by the voice-over of the two members of the group. The two boys meet at the dawn of adolescence, in a suburb of north London, and one immediately takes the other under his wing.
More sassy, ??more popular, better supported by his parents, it is first Andrew the guitarist the pillar of the duo. Rehearsals in the garage, embryos of songs tweaked on a portable studio… The film strides through the early youth of those who were not yet called Wham! but The Executive, of which we will mainly remember an improbable ska version of The Letter to Elise, by Beethoven.
Too bad the movie doesn’t dwell more on Andrew and Michael’s musical training and influences, as if the sugary pop of Wham! was just a product of its time. Because the two men compose and write all their songs, and it is with a rap mixed with disco (Wham Rap!) that the duo, accompanied by their two singers, broke the house in 1983, the year of their passage in the very popular “Top of the Pops” program on the BBC. Despite the “Club Med” look and the bouffant hairstyles, the exclamation point and the repeated choreography in the kitchen, the film never loses sight of the great artistic ambitions nurtured by the two friends.
They will lead George Michael, more gifted, to take precedence over writing and composition, and Andrew Ridgeley to step aside with a certain elegance. The success of the film is undoubtedly due to its way of seizing, modestly, how the homosexuality that George Michael kept secret for a very long time cemented the friendship between the two men during the few years that their collaboration lasted. In 1986, the group disbanded and George Michael began a dazzling solo career. It is with great delicacy that the film suggests that the singer, who died in 2016, never quite recovered from this separation.
