In ‘Housekeeping for Beginners,’ a makeshift family evokes universal pain

Katie Walsh April 4, 2024 Romania’s

Anamaria Marinca has a knack for playing characters youd want in your corner during a crisis. The

actorRomanian actress

, who starred in Cristian Mungius harrowing

2007

abortion thriller 4 Months, 3 w W eeks, and 2 Days, is the eye of the storm in Goran Stolevskis Housekeeping for Beginners, a riveting domestic drama that finds her similarly raging against the machine.

No one smokes a cigarette with such quiet

,ly

harried intensity as Marinca,

nor is there anyand there is no

forgetting her glittering stare, both of which Stolevski utilizes to great effect. In his third feature in as many years this one

was

selected as

theNorth

Macedonia’s

n

Oscar entry for

Best I i

nternational

Film feature

the

Macedonian Australian

filmmaker plunges us into

athe

swirling eddy of merry but harrowing chaos among an unusual family. The film is a showcase for the skill and screen presence of the criminally underrated Marinca, who stars as Dita, a lesbian social worker trying to hold together her tribe by sheer force of will, coaxing and cajoling the system in order to knit together her queer found family.

Theres a deeply humanist core to Stolevskis work, which varies in genre and tone, but always captures the bittersweet beauty of life. He made his feature debut with

2022’s

You Wont Be Alone, a life-affirming fairy tale in which Marinca co-starred as a grotesquely disfigured witch. His sophomore feature, Of an Age, is a

queer

romance about two young men who connect in a

Melbourne

beach town in Melbourne

, Australia

.

We enter Housekeeping for Beginners with a burst of joyous song, as Ali (Samson Selim), Vanesa (Mia Mustafa)

,

and Mia (Dzada Selim) dance and sing around a living room. Their carefree fun is quickly juxtaposed with a burst of rage

,

in a doctors office, as Suada (Alina Serban), with

Marinca’s

Dita by her side, explodes at a bored, negligent doctor. Shes furious at him for ignoring

her and other

patients who look like her

: Roma. With these two scenes, Stolevski establishes the films message and tone, weaving together childlike play and mischief with the crushing reality of racial and sexual inequality.

Stolevski, who wrote, directed

,

and edited the film, delivers the relevant story details in snippets of dialogue and visual asides snatched out of the river of familial hubbub that is captured with a roaming handheld

cameracinematography

by

cinematographer

Naum Doksevski. Dita and Suada are partners.

, and

Suadas kids, Vanesa and Mia, live with them in Ditas home. Their gay roommate, Toni (Vladimir Tintor)

,

had Ali over for a hookup, but

hes Ali is

so much fun he becomes one of the stray queer kids they collect, which also includes a trio of young lesbians (Sara Klimoska, Rozafa Celaj

,

and Ajse Useini) who seek refuge in this safe house.

Suada has cancer

,

and knowing that her prognosis is terminal, she demands that Dita become the mother of her girls

, in her : a

final, fierce act to secure their future. She also requests that Dita give them Tonis last name so that they might escape the discrimination she faced as a Roma woman. The girls need legal guardians

,

and that is how a stressed lesbian and grumpy gay man find themselves married. To each other.

Within

its “Housekeeping’s”

restless, naturalistic aesthetic, Stolevski crafts complex and poignant images, contrasting the playacting the couple is forced to do with their searing gazes. At a parent-teacher conference, condolences are delivered to Toni, but the camera rests on the bereaved Ditas face, unable to openly grieve the loss of her longtime partner. Their

formal

courthouse wedding is also a study in ironic double meaning, as Ali sits next to his lover Toni, but only as a witness. At

their a

raucous, booze-soaked celebration at home later, Ali thanks Dita for the opportunity to sit in front of the marriage registrar with the man he loves.

Theres no preciousness or over-explication about the socio

–

political

and economic

issues that shape their reality and make up the fabric of their lives: how they move in the world, the risks they take, the dreams they have. It is a quotidian kind of oppression, rendered here as a series of irritating clerical hoops, though the consequences of not jumping through them could be deadly.

While

the Stolevski’s

subject matter is sobering, there is a dry humor at play, coupled with real warmth. Dzada Selim steals the movie as the precocious Mia, and if Dita is the spine of the family,

Samson Selim’s

Ali is

the its

heart, his ability to connect proving valuable when Vanesas teenage rebellions spiral out of control.

Stolevskis scripts always bear a line that pierces

at

the heart of life itself

,

and Housekeeping for Beginners is no exception. It doesnt go away, the needing, Dita promises Vanesa, even when you get old. Its a nasty business. Its a beautiful

ly

, brutally apt way to describe

both

a family

,

and the human condition,

perfectly,

concisely expressed in the way only Stolevski can.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.