Housekeeping for Beginners

(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.

Suada has two kids, Vanesa (Mia Mustafi) who’s old enough to be starting to be a problem, and Mia (Dzada Selim), who’s a tiny firecracker. They are from… a different background from the rest of the people in the house, who seem mostly to be queer and / or gender non-conforming people seeking refuge and a place to sleep, safe from the general intolerance that exists outside.

It’s not depicted as an Iranian / Islamic Revolutionary regime or current Putinesque Russian / or Floridian level of state sanctioned violence against the rainbow community and its allies – it’s more of a general distrust of what the authorities might do, as well as the general homophobia and intolerance of conservative Macedonian society. But there’s an added wrinkle here, which could be a bit shocking for non-Macedonian audiences. Suada and her kids, and several of the other characters in the flick are from a Roma background. They face additional prejudice on top of whatever else – it has played a role in Suada’s general cynicism and belief that everyone is out to get her, and her entrenched belief that nothing will go well for her kids unless they manipulate The System to the kids’ benefit.

I mean, I guess the bigger problem is that Dita takes Suada to appointments which strongly imply something is medically wrong with Suada. That’s all well and good, but Suada is also a violent nut, which no amount of doctor’s appointments will help with.

She and Dita are also in love. One could argue that Suada’s fierceness in the face of prejudice, or medical indifference, is because of fears for her own mortality, or what will become of her kids, or an accumulation of trauma based on decades of life experience, but really she is a violent nut with a personality disorder / major chip on her shoulder.

She chooses not to battle her pancreatic cancer (which has only a 20 per cent chance of treatment, probably lower if you’re Romani), but secures a promise from Dita that she pretend, along with gay housemate Toni (Vladimir Tintor) to be the parents of Mia and Vanesa when she’s gone.

It’s a tremendously big ask. She wants her kids to grow up “white”. The term is used so often I’m pretty sure it’s not a mistranslation. There is a clear delineation in this film between the expectations of what a “white” life can be like in Skopje, and what Romani lives are worth there, even amongst people who happily (and noisily) co-exist, as in Dita’s household.

Out of love for Suada, Dita agrees to something she does not want to do at all, having never wanted to be a mum, and not really wanting to be a mum to these kids anyway. I mean Mia is an absolute delight, but the surly Vanesa, who is built like a boxer and acts like one too, is cruising for a bruising.

She’s at that stage of adolescent immaturity where she’d happily hurt herself just to make Dita or anyone else who might care about her feel bad. It’s a dangerous time. And she doesn’t seem to be very bright.

Within this mix, right from the start, is a young chap called Ali (Samson Selim), who, I cannot exaggerate enough, is so charming and has so much energy that he and Mia could power a city if they were hooked up to the right equipment. Starting off as one of Toni’s one night stands, he hangs around and desperately tries to integrate himself into this makeshift family.

Dita grumbles about it consistently like she’s Marge Simpson. What sort of seals the deal, albeit very precariously, is that Mia and Vanesa love him, and he defaults to essentially giving Mia all the parenting that no-one else has time for.

He happens, as well, to be from the same place that Suada is from.

To my shame I have to admit that I didn’t know about the region of Suto Orizari, or Shutka, as they usually call it in this flick, in North Macedonia, which is the only place in Europe where the Romani live and rule themselves. Naturally, since they seem to be the most hated minority throughout Europe for at least the last thousand years except for the, um, Jewish people, it’s also one of the most impoverished places on God’s green earth.

Perhaps many Roma live there believing it’s the one place that they won’t be kicked out of. Other European countries every now and then expel them on masse, so maybe they’ve got a point.

Regardless, okay, so they have shacks, carts and donkeys. Suada doesn’t want to return to that. She doesn’t want her kids to have to return to that. She wants them to have all the opportunities that all other paler Macedonians have, which is to sell dodgy vapes or tobacco, or be sex trafficked elsewhere as a way of getting out of there.

And Ali doesn’t want to have to go back either. Despite Dita’s lack of trust, and Toni’s wayward affections, Ali’s efforts are generally in the service of anyone who needs anything, regardless of the legality of it, and instead of being a bullshitter that promises big and delivers nothing, he’s actually quite the resourceful chap / Artful Dodger.

He really is a wonderful character. In the hands of a different director the whole story would have been from his perspective, but he’s part of an ensemble, and despite all the dislike most of the characters have for her, it’s Dita’s story, since she’s the one furiously juggling everything to keep everyone out of trouble or worse.

There seems to be a worrying abstractness to the law or legality in their world, I guess, which reflects the fact that, to many of these people, the law is something to avoid, not something to work with. Dita being an employee of the state doesn’t make her any more keen to expect the machinations of the administrative world to be workable for her or to protect any of them, because of, mostly, their sexualities. And that means, in order to get things done, she has to lie to absolutely everyone she works with and everyone she’s ever worked with, maintaining a fiction that her beloved Suada was her ‘cousin\’, and that she, as a lesbian, and Toni, as a gay man, are happily married and happily parent two children they have no biological connection to.

I will admit that the story, such as it is, is messy and exhausting, and that’s perfect for this film. The performances are perfectly appropriate, and loud, and aggravating, and they feel real. This doesn’t feel like an exploitative tour through poverty, though it does feel like a sometimes hilarious, sometimes dispiriting slice of these people’s lives, with occasional passionate karaoke and explosive, instantly regretted violence. I hesitate to use the term ‘underclass’, because I don’t know what that would mean in this context. It feels real, and plausible. Lived in, even.

These are people without social, economic or legal empowerment, so they make do, the best they can, with what they have. And they do it beautifully, for my money. I enjoyed this flick a lot, I enjoyed watching it, and I enjoyed learning about a version of life from this place I know nothing about. Anamaria Marinca is so good with such a difficult character. She’s spiky in her own way, surrounded by a bunch of people spiky in their own ways too. Some of the handheld camerawork maybe made me a bit more anxious than I would have liked, but I guess it added to the feeling of being a part of this large found family fumbling along and trying to get through the chaos and the drudgery of life while mocking the fuck out of each other.

8 times so, so many swears out of 10

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“Lady, you’ve got a screw loose.” - Housekeeping for Beginners

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi1449379609/