Story of blended queer family captures bittersweet beauty
Anamaria Marinca has a knack for playing characters you’d want in your corner during a crisis. The Romanian actor, who starred in Cristian Mungiu’s abortion thriller “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” is the eye of the storm in Goran Stolevski’s “Housekeeping for Beginners,” a riveting domestic drama that finds her similarly raging against the machine.
No one smokes a cigarette with such quiet intensity as Marinca, and there is no forgetting her glittering stare, both of which Stolevski uses to great effect. In his third feature in as many years — this one selected as the North Macedonian Oscar entry for best international film — the Macedonian Australian filmmaker plunges us into the swirling eddy of chaos among an unconventional family. The film is a showcase for the skill and screen presence of 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.
There’s a deeply humanist core to Stolevski’s work, which varies in genre and tone, but always captures life’s bittersweet beauty.
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 doctor’s office, as Suada (Alina Serban), with Dita by her side, explodes at a negligent physician. She’s furious
at him for ignoring her and other patients who look like her — Roma.
With these two scenes, Stolevski establishes the message and tone, weaving together childlike play with the crushing reality of racial and sexual inequality.
Stolevski, who wrote, directed and edited the film, delivers the details in snippets of dialogue and visual asides snatched out of the river of familial hubbub. Dita and Suada are partners, and Suada’s kids, Vanesa and Mia, live with them in Dita’s home. Their gay roommate, Toni (Vladimir Tintor), had Ali over for a hookup, but he’s so much fun he becomes one of the stray queer kids they keep safe.
Suada has cancer, and knowing that her prognosis is terminal, she demands that Dita become the mother of her girls, in her final act to secure their future.
She also requests that Dita give them Toni’s last name so they might escape the discrimination she faced as a Roma woman. The girls need legal guardians, and that’s how a lesbian and a grumpy gay man find themselves married to each other.
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 Dita’s face, unable to openly grieve the loss of her partner.
Dzada Selim steals the movie as the precocious Mia, and if Dita is the spine of the family, Ali is the heart, his ability to connect with others proving valuable when Vanesa’s teenage rebellions spiral out of control.
Stolevski’s scripts always bear a line that pierces at the heart of life itself, and “Housekeeping for Beginners” is no exception. “It doesn’t go away, the needing,” Dita promises Vanesa, “even when you get old. It’s a nasty business.” It’s a brutally apt way to describe a family, and the human condition, perfectly, expressed in the way only Stolevski can.
(In Albanian, Macedonian and Romani with English subtitles)
MPA rating: R (for sexual content, language throughout and some teen drinking)
Running time: 1:47
How to watch: In theaters