2023

(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.

dir: Daina Oniunas-Pusiċ

2023

A film about a dying teenager… It’s not a guaranteed barrel of laughs. I guess there’s this weird sub-genre of YA books adapted to movies about dying teenagers finding love (just before the end), but in general you’d think studios worry the subject matter is too confronting to get bums on seats in theatres.

What about… Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the great Julia Louis-Dreyfus? If I told you she was in it, would that entice you back into the cinema? She has a solid number of post-Seinfeld performances such that you would think a decent person wouldn’t have to mention what she’s most famous for. She’s been great in those Nicole Holofcener movies like Enough Said and You Hurt My Feewings, and there’s her amazing run on Veep.

Her performance is much neater and much more straight-forward here (even as the story becomes more fantastical). She plays the mother of a dying teenager, and she’s pretty much in denial about it despite the constant and unavoidable daily struggle to keep things together. She knows her daughter is dying, but she can’t even talk to her daughter about it, and sort-of avoids her, palming her off onto the nurse who looks after her (Leah Harvey). She has a nurse to look after Tuesday (Lola Pettigrew) during the day, but she spends that time pawning things, hanging out in cafes and sleeping on a bench in a park.

Why? Well, why not?

These are not the characters we first meet in this flick, not really. There’s another character I haven’t mentioned yet who plays the most central role, other than Tuesday. I don’t know if it’s a he, or how they choose to style themselves, but today’s the day you find out that Death Himself or Death Itself is an orange macaw. A parrot. The Parrot of Death (Arinze Mokwe Kene). Born of the void, he has no friends, but he has one task, and that is to visit the dying, wave his mighty wing at them, and then see them ushered out of this world.

He grows large, he grows small as needs be, he is greeted with relief, or hate, or fear, or scorn, but the result is the same.

(Kuolleet Lehdet)

dir: Aki Kaurismäki

2023

Fallen Leaves is the most recent film from Finland’s greatest ever director. Well, I say that, knowing nothing about Finland’s film industry. There could be way better directors in Finland. But none of them have had anywhere near the level of international acclaim as Aki Kaurismäki. It’s probably because he’s been doing it for forty years or so. It’s possibly because of the quality of his films.

It could be because of the fact that his name rhymes so wonderfully. Aki Kaurismäki. Rolls off the tongue.

He is at least the only one who routinely got played in arthouse cinemas in Australia over the years. If there is a single other popular or critically acclaimed Finnish director, I haven’t heard of them, and I hear about a lot of people from a lot of places. Renny Harlin is the only other one I can think of, and he hasn’t made anything vaguely good in decades. The only other Finnish film I can think of that’s come out recently is that one where the gold prospector kills all them fucking Nazis, which was delightful (Sisu), but that’s only one movie.

My man Aki has been pumping them out since the 80s. Since Leningrad Cowboys Go America, he has been delighting audiences around the world with his cinematic antics. Maybe “delighting” is too strong a term. I don’t know if he’s even that well-known and beloved in Finland.

His films are so strictly formalist and the humour is so droll and deadpan that I don’t even know if they’re really that representative of Finnish culture or sensibilities, contemporary or otherwise. Maybe they’re more sophisticated than the rest of us. Maybe they still think Benny Hill is the pinnacle of human achievement. I don’t know. I actually know some Finnish people, and, I’ll tell you something for free, they think Australians are total yokel hillbillies.

But, and this is a big butt and I cannot lie about it, they are as likely to laugh uproariously at something they find funny, or loudly express themselves about something they care about as possibly anyone else on the planet, so this impression you get from Finnish flicks generally or the whole idea of those Nordic regions about how restrained and expression-less they are is of course bullshit.

Everyone is restrained with people they don’t know. In their own elements, well, they carry on like pork chops or whatever the Finnish equivalent is.

dir: Baloji

2023

The actual title for this in English is Omen, but I went with the French-Walloon title because I didn’t want it to be confused with one of the multitude of Omen horror flicks that are out there in the wild.

At first, as Koffi (Marc Zinga) and his wife Alice (Lucie Debay) travel back to Koffi’s hometown of Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I wondered if this was going to be one of those many films that’s about someone introducing someone to their family, only for everyone to have a heart attack, and endure hours of culturally or linguistically-based misunderstandings before eventually coming to accept things, and come to terms with things, and everyone hugs in the end.

Even though the form predates the movies entirely, I do selfishly think of it as the My Big Fat *insert ethnicity as required* Wedding format. This film… does not follow that path, to say the least.

The Democratic Republic of Congo seems like… a complicated place. Koffi hasn’t been back home for 18 years, which I’m guessing means he’s in his mid thirties, and has been happily living in Belgium all this time. His pregnant wife Alice, is pretty clearly not Congolese, but she is Belgian, so at least they have that in common. As I alluded to before, they are nervous to meet with Koffi’s family, especially his mum Mujila (Yves-Marina Gnahoua) and his dad Abel (some guy always out of shot, existing only offscreen), and they have good reason to.

The celebration they get to is surprisingly unwelcoming, so I guess it’s not in their honour. Look, I’m a fairly sensitive and paranoid kind of chap, always assuming that I’m the one at fault when misunderstandings happen or when things go wrong – I don’t think people are out to get me: I assume I’m out to get myself. Watching Koffi go through what he goes through with his family, be rebuffed, and then have things go even worse (though thankfully not in a violent sense, though it’s very close to the line) is like every paranoid person’s nightmare. It goes about as bad as one could imagine, and it’s not because of anything Koffi deliberately does.

Yes, a lot of it has to do with the superstitiousness of these people and this place. Rural Lubumbashi doesn’t seem like a place overflowing with appreciation for science or rational arguments. Koffi is doomed before he ever crossed the threshold: for stuff completely out of his control. His mother’s meanness and coldness isn’t explained until late in the film, and yet mostly all of his problems seem to stem from the fact that he has a birthmark on his cheek which these superstitious yokels think means he’s marked by the devil, which is why he had to leave in the first place.

A birthmark? A facial difference? How dumb are the superstitions of these tribal folks?