Like its playful title, Housekeeping for Beginners can elicit a chuckle among its dramatic affairs. Director Goran Stolevski, finding his home in cerulean sunrises and cluttered homes, casts another silhouette behind human connection. While his previous films are driven in different species and timelines, they are thematically connected by the desire to belong to someone or somewhere. Despite its loosely drawn margins, Housekeeping for Beginners is in step with Stolevski’s palette for kinship in unusual circumstances.
The film begins with a burdened Suada (Alina Serban) and her girlfriend Dita (Anamaria Marinca) navigating the woes of finding a competent physician in Skopja, the metropolitan capital of North Macedonia. Suada has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, but, as indicated by an office visit interrupted by a Roma frustrated with the wait time, we find that the healthcare system has not kindly taken care of their ethnic group. Furthermore, Suada is the kind of person to bare her teeth even when wounded; she does not care for Dita’s desperate googling for alternative solutions or pity from others. Instead, she prepares for the worst, ensuring that her daughters Mia (Dżada Selim) and Vanesa (Mia Mustafi) will be looked after when she’s gone.
Physically, it might be impossible for the family house to feel empty; other occupants include young queer runaways who were banished from their home, plus a perpetually grumpy Toni (Vladimir Tintor) and his current situationship Ali (Samson Selim). Nevertheless, it is a cruel fate when Suada’s departure comes early in the film and the house is momentarily still following their leader’s death. It is not long before the motions of daily life kick into gear again. The film has touching moments that ring from the intimacy in Stolevski’s Of an Age, but there is a bit of mystical effect traced back to You Won’t Be Alone. Suada’s aggressive spirit seems to find a new host in a previously meek Dita, who takes it upon herself to re-establish order at the house (not for nothing, Marinca also played the witch mother of a shapeshifter in You Won’t Be Alone). A toddler-eyed Mia inherits Suada’s disgruntled expressions and Vanesa a reflex to clash against everyone and everything around her. Even in the physical absence of someone, it doesn’t quite mean that they’re gone.
For better or worse, Housekeeping for Beginners travels in a tunnel. To keep the children, Dita marries Toni (who unsurprisingly becomes more grumpy at being maritally bound to a woman) and inadvertently “reveals” her secret family to her co-workers. There are explicit references to the injustice that the Roma and queer people face, but the issues dance at the edges of the film’s framing of the centered family, focusing on one issue at a time: Vanesa’s anger, Ali disappearing after a fight with Toni, Vanesa disappearing after Ali disappears, etc. As Albanians, Dita and Toni have a privilege that Vanesa, Mia, and Ali do not have, which play into some of nuanced differences in their environment and situations, including the change in scenery from Skopja to the Roma-populated town of Shutka. But the limitations of their existence are only as big as they make them; in this house, they can be loud, crass, and unwavering in emotion or desire.
And it never gets boring. Similar to sitting down at a family dinner, the insults get nasty in a familiar way, less improv and more of a recollection from actors who may have participated in these circles. The hetero charades might heighten the fear of retaliation if the gig is up, but luckily, the film plays along with a ribbing ease (“You chose that shirt to wear?” Dita furiously whispers to Toni before entering a party). While the portrait is on a smaller scale, Stolevski once again paints a new picture of the Macedonian cinema, and he’s doing so in his own terms.
Housekeeping for Beginners
2023
dir. Goran Stolevski
107 min.
Opens Friday, 4/12 @ Kendall Square Cinema
