Aberdeen on the Adriatic

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2003 by Cardullo, Bert

EVEN THOUGH THE ACADEMY AwARDs ARE SEVERAL MONTHS AWAY, it's time to bash the American cinema once again-indirectly, at least. For I refuse to waste much space on the mostly execrable and often juvenile products of the "entertainment industry" collectively known as Hollywood. That space, or this column, is reserved for films like Aberdeen, a co-production of Norway and Scotland, and The Son's Room, made in Italy but partly financed by the French) These two pictures are comparable not only because they are both domestic dramas whose drama is triggered by the recent or impending death of a family member. They are also connected because each features a stereotypical screen figure, particularly in the United States, and treats him credibly, sympathetically, perceptively-without caricature, on the one hand, or romanticization, on the other. In Aberdeen, that figure is the acute alcoholic; in The Son's Room, he becomes the psychiatrist or psychoanalyst.

Let's start with Hans Petter Moland's "small," beautifully acted Aberdeen, one of whose strengths is its refusal to give its characters' substance abuse (liquor and cocaine) even the faintest patina of hipness. Another strength is the heat with which it treats the range of emotional possibilities between a young woman and her father; I can't think of any American movie that comes close to Aberdeen in this department. The forty-six-year-old Moland happens to have been educated in America, and ironically on American movies, though he was born in Norway. Aberdeen, which he co-wrote, is his third feature but only his first film in English.

The picture begins in London, where Kaisa, a corporate lawyer on the rise, is having sex in her apartment. (It's very much to the point of her hard-edged, feisty, even ribald character that she's on top, that we never see the man or learn anything about him, and that he doesn't appear again in the picture.) The morning after, this young woman gets a telephone call from her mother, Helen, who lives in Aberdeen, Scotland. She wants Kaisa to go to Oslo and bring her father-Tomas, a Norwegian-to Aberdeen. Helen and Tomas were never married, and she ended their relationship fifteen years earlier, but now she hopes for Tomas' rehabilitation, in Scotland, from the alcoholism that saddles him and prematurely ended his career as an offshore oil-rig worker. The real catalyst for mother as well as daughter, however, is Helen's disclosure that she has cancer in an advanced stage and yearns for a family reunion that will culminate in her legal marriage to Tomas.

Immediately after the opening credits but before the above-described bedroom scene, we see Kaisa, as a child of about ten sporting a red clown-nose, running to greet her returning father (who, whether off the Scottish or the Norwegian coast, worked for two weeks at a time in the North Sea), in his Italian sports car, in a rush of feeling. We shall watch this grainy, slow-motion, sunlight-suffused flashback again during Aberdeen, just as we shall see the red clown-nose-attached, in the present, to Kaisa's keyring and at one juncture to her father's nose together with the now-vintage automobile, an Alfa Romeo that sits gathering dust in an Aberdeen garage but will be Helen's reward to her daughter for retrieving Tomas.

Yet any sentimentalism that might be attached to either object is undercut by the fact that a red clown-nose is also the sign of a severe drunk, and that Tomas is anything but an Alpha personality or a Romeo type. Sentimentalism is also undercut by the irony of the song playing on the soundtrack during the aforementioned flashbacks, as well as during one scene in the present: "I'm Getting Along Just Fine Without You," performed by another addict, the drug-user Chet Baker, whose music the adult Kaisa peevishly says she deplores solely on account of his heroin habit.

Kaisa may once have been strongly attached to her father (though, like him, she dislikes her mother), but she hasn't seen Tomas for ten years. Those who are the children of alcoholics-and, as a workaholic with a fear of intimacy, a vulnerability to substance abuse herself (she's the coke-snorter, which gives her a red nose in the form of nasal bleeding), and a love of life in the fast lane, Kaisa is a classic case-know that she is courting disaster in trying to deal with a father who not only is a drunk, but also has not heard from his daughter for such a long time. At least Kaisa has his address in Oslo, whither she flies, dressed in a smart black business suit, and promptly rents a flashy new car with which to impress Tomas (claiming it as her own). She traces him to a pub, naturally, where he is truculent and sodden but somehow strong, with the special pathos and irritation of an intelligent, even well-read, man who is a hopeless boozer.

Kaisa has told herself that she can deliver her father to her mother in the space of a day; and she is sufficiently assertive that Tomas, who continually smokes as well as drinks, agrees reluctantly to accompany her. But he is so falling-down drunk that he is not allowed to board the plane to the United Kingdom, while chip-off-the-old-block Kaisa is so verbally abusive toward the flight attendant that she nearly lands herself in jail. Perversely, this airport fracas creates a sort of bonding between father and daughter. And in the automobile Kaisa has rented, she and Tomas proceed to drive to the port of Bergen, where they will board a ship to England. He has taken along a supply of beer and whiskey, which Kaisa constantly threatens to ration; and she has her stash of cocaine, a fix from which she decides to take at one point after she suddenly stops her car along the highway. Staggering out into the snowy desolation of the Norwegian countryside-whose frigid weather reflects the chilliness of this father-daughter relationship-Kaisa is startled by a pair of passing reindeer as she kneels down to snort her drug.