Aberdeen (2000)

I remember this much: Aberdeen (dir. Hans Petter Moland) is a good film. Trying to recall my initial experience of watching it, I couldn't really atriculate why. Perhaps for this reason, I was a bit disappointed while watching it a second time. The images of a frail relationship between father and daughter still moved me, and I was still impressed by the bleak locations of the film - but a few flaws were hard to ignore. Stellan Skarsgård is great as the drunkard, father of a daughter whom he barely knows. Sometimes he overdoes the trick, but when you see him barfing in the car, you believe what you see, and you feel with the man. Being an alcoholic does not look cool, it does not look nice; it looks like piss and puke and bad, yet ambivalent, conscience. Usually, he stays away from the sentimental, but there are a few lapses. Lena Headey's role is trickier. She is the rebel, a person who is not afraid to speak her mind, and her mind tends towards the dark and cynical. Headey is great, fierce. Sometimes, her lines and gestures are simply too streamlined, and we know all to well what we are supposed to think about her: sad, sad girl who lacks the ability to form deep commitments. A cliché about 'wild women'. The miserable turns into miserabilism. Charlotte Rampling, whose performances tends to be dazzling and mesmerizing, does not really shine here; she is given too little space.

The dramatic nerve of the film, family bonds, usually skews the path of treating family relations as a black-and-white issue. These people, father, daughter, a dying mother, obviously have many problems with each other, they piss each other off, they are disappointed at one another - but at the same time there is something else also, a form of absolute responsibility. Aberdeen is beautifully shot and one of the great merits of the film is the way shabby places come alive: an oil rig seen from a distance, an ordinary-looking road, a sleazy diner. On the downside, there are a couple of heavy-handed twists that appear both unnecessary and that digress from what makes this film so good: the intimate, spunky moments between father and child.