Aberdeen
With Stellan Skarsgård, Lena Headey, Charlotte Rampling.
Norway/UK, 2000, 35mm, color, 102 min.
Norwegian-born director Petter Moland spent his formative years in the United States and studied film right here in Boston at Emerson College during the 1980s. His third feature film is a pitch-black comedy that examines the relationship between a snobbish young professional woman (Headey) and her long-estranged alcoholic father (Skarsgård). The bliss of Kaisa’s champagne promotion party at her London law firm is interrupted the morning after by a phone call from her mother in Scotland: she wants the daughter to fetch the father from Oslo and deliver him to Aberdeen for an experimental detox program. The reunion of father and daughter is more bitter than sweet as the mission derails on series of tumultuous conflicts. An extended car trip, however, goes a long way toward achieving emotional rehabilitation for both parties.