Housekeeping for Beginners
On coming from a broken home... and keeping it together
with Blu Tack and duct tape
(Домаќинство за почетници
Domaḱinstvo za početnici)
dir: Goran Stolevski
2023
Housekeeping for Beginners gave me no tips on how to maintain a household whatsoever, though in truth I’ve been housekeeping for decades so probably need a more advanced primer for veterans of housekeeping who are still rank amateurs at what they do.
And, wow, it’s not really about housekeeping at all, unless you use the term in the broader sense of “how does one desperately keep a household together when the bond between the members is tenuous and mostly based on necessity and the general hostility outside?”
This is set and filmed in the city of Skopje, which is in the relatively new country of Northern Macedonia. Yes, I’m continuing to watch and review only films from places that are not America. This will continue for the foreseeable future, until those idiots improve or my fury abates.
This is directed by a Macedonian / Australian director called Goran Stolevski, who perhaps isn’t yet a household name, or a legend in the field of housekeeping, but he is someone who I think I will always be interested in because his first film You Won’t Be Alone was such a singularly fantastic film. I had never seen anything like it and am unlikely to ever see anything like it ever again, as long as I might live, and let’s be honest it’s probably not going to be hundreds of years.
This is a completely different film, especially since it’s set contemporarily, but it displays, just as keenly, this director’s alacrity with the camera, with actors, and with getting everything on the screen to cohere and to deliver a very human story about very messy people trying to live their lives in a society where they’re always at risk of becoming further pariahs.
Though, wonderfully, the same actor that played the diabolical Burnt Maria in You Won’t Be Alone being the great Anamaria Marinca, plays the lead here, of Dita.
It’s chaos, the whole house is chaos. Though it does seem cramped, it also seems fun. Dita is a welfare officer, a put upon and always late social worker whose work is undervalued especially by those she tries to help. One of the people she ‘tried’ to help in life in the past was obviously Suada (Alina Serban), and she’s trying to help her now, as well, through some ominous looking medical appointments with doctors that clearly do not give a shit about her.