(courtesy IMP Awards)
It’s tempting to think of families are solely places of bountiful joy and unconditional love; after all, in a world that seethes with contempt and cruelty and seems to delight in isolation and aloneness, families are a selfless bastion of all that is good and wonderful, and so we cling to the alluring idea that that’s all they are because why on earth would we not?
And while yes, they are often all the good things we want them to be, they don’t arrive at that place without some pain, some sense of dislocation and a fight by their members for a individuality and sovereignty of choice that they fear being part of a family might take away from them.
This dynamic applies to both biological families, and found families, those groupings of disparate people who come together, often without expecting to and who become the anchor and selfless support none of the members knew they needed.
One such family sits at the heart of the new film, Housekeeping For Beginners, from writer and director Goran Stolevski (Of An Age), which sagely understands while being part of a family can be an enrichingly wondrous and supportive thing, getting to the point where it is what we need it to be can be a trying ordeal, one marked by loss, grief, painful moments and searing moments where we realise what it is that really matters to us.
While the trailer shows mostly the glossy, happy end to things, and only hints at the darkly, difficult road to get there, Housekeeping For Beginners spends much of its time in the painfully transformative weeds, as each of its key characters struggle to become the people they need to be and who will come together, in time though not perfectly (thankfully the film never lets itself be tied in neat and tidy Disneyesque bows) to be the family that defines the future of their lives.
Lives that, by the way, in a still highly conservative North Macedonia, and specifically the capital of Skopje, are viewed with some suspicion and distrust, if not outright hostility.
Almost all the members of the unorthodox household overseen by Dita (Anamaria Marinca) and Suada (Alina Șerban) are queer, people rejected by their families or society who have found a place of unquestioning, of chaotically noisy and emotional unpredictable, belonging.
Apart from Dita and Suada, a couple who are facing their own deeply sad reckoning as the latter struggles to deal with a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, the household consists of angry-at-life Toni (Vladimir Tintor) and his sweet if hardy younger Roma boyfriend Ali (Samsom Selim) who quickly becomes a big brother of sorts to Suada’s two daughters, Vanesa (Mia Mustafa) and Mia (Džada Selim).
Along with a number of other young women who find a home where previously they had none, these key characters form a family who, in the wake of the tragic loss of Suada, have to find a way to make their family, ramshackle and thrown together as it is, into something meaningful and lasting.
Apart from the emotional challenges this presents, there are real legal hurdles to overcome too; Dita is not the girls’ biological mother and so, with Suada gone, it takes some really nimble legal manoeuvring, much of it not strictly legal – okay, not legal at all but necessary with a marriage of convenience, forged paperwork and impressive playacting needed to keep the conservative forces that would come against them at bay; that is dramatically intense but also beautifully, transcendentally funny – to keep the sanctuary-like found family that has grown organically in one piece and place.
What Housekeeping For Beginners explores with such profound insight and empathy is what happens when a haphazard conglomeration of people, who come together accidentally and without clear intent or purpose, have to suddenly and strategically work to keep what they have built by chance and happenstance into something that will endure beyond the grief-stricken emotional aftermath of Suada’s death.
Suddenly the lazy hanging out of before has to be the mindful drawing together of the after, and Housekeeping For Beginners, far from being a fairytale of found family building much of the time, acknowledges and lives out just how monstrously and taxingly tough it can be.
So tough in fact that over the course of this intensely dramatic film, which is broken up by scenes of great levity and playful insight, embodying the light and dark of any family, you begin to wonder if any of the people in it will survive the journey to something more more robust and deliberate.
To keep the family together legally, they must make clear and unambiguous choices, stick to them and live them out, and it’s clear much of the time that they may not be able to do that.
Vanesa and Dita are banging heads as a grief-swamped Vanesa acts out after the loss of her mother in an ill-thought-out and frankly dangerous ways (including the final act where there are real moments of life endangeringly poor decisions coming home to roost) while Toni, who’s permanent scowl hides a tortured soul that has no idea how to treasure the good things he now has, is struggling to know how to treat Ali (hint not very well much of the time until some sort of fractured, hesitant apology kind of but not assuredly mends things).
It’s the explosive power of these relationships that drives the narrative of Housekeeping For Beginners which, while it has a lot of plot points to tick, is more concerned with the fractious interplay between the characters, and how while they might seem like each other’s enemies, they are all simply trying, rather poorly and emotionally messily at times, to get to the same happy ending.
They don’t know if they want it, they don’t even seem to know what it is beyond staying together in some fashion, all of which makes for a chaotic journey that could well have spun horrendously out of control save for the fact that Stolevski seems masterfully able to keep a lot of competingly chaotic elements all heading in the same affectingly cohesive direction.
Housekeeping For Beginners is brutally honest about how dark and terrifyingly uncertain life can be, admitting that while belonging to a special group of people can be a bulwark against those malignantly messy existential tendencies, building that place of joyous sanctuary and love isn’t easy and may require everything people have got if they are to realise the very thing that could change the course and fabric of their lives, especially when it is seems like it is going to fatally and heartstoppingly break and spin apart.