Despite never aspiring to be a mother, Dita finds herself compelled to raise her girlfriend’s two daughters. As their individual wills clash, a heartwarming story unfolds about an unlikely family’s struggle to stay together.
Writer/director Goran Stolevski likes to throw his viewers in the pool’s deep end, so to speak. His prior film, “Of An Age,” begins in such a chaotic manner that I was immediately irritated from the start; his characters hurriedly talking/screaming at each other, mostly indecipherably, did not set the mood for what was to be a romance. This film, “Housekeeping for Beginners,” likewise, throws its viewers into deep water.
There is a lot to unwrap as the movie begins. Stolevski makes the viewer work to figure out how these characters are connected and what’s going on. A scene of a group of people dancing and singing along to a song abruptly changes to a scene of two women at a doctor’s office. The women are Dita (Anamaria Marinca) and Suada (Alina Serban), whose names we don’t discover until much later. Eventually, we piece together that Suada has cancer.
Like “Of An Age,” this film’s opening is chaotic. Characters talk quickly, throwing lots of information at the viewer in a short amount of time. It’s overwhelming, requiring rapt attention to keep up. This is not the type of movie one can throw on in the background and expect to follow.
From what I could gather, Dita is some social worker who has created a safe house for members of the LGBTQ community, including Suada (who is Dita’s girlfriend) and her two daughters along with Toni (Vladimir Tintor), his lover Ali (Samson Selim), and three other unnamed women. If these women were named in the film, I never caught it. The number of characters introduced adds to the chaotic nature and confusion of the movie’s opening scenes. Unfortunately, I struggled to follow what was happening in multiple moments throughout the film.
Stolevski doesn’t do much to induct viewers into Dita’s world. It’s never entirely clear what country this movie takes place in. The characters mention Macedonia at one point, but a definitive location isn’t given. There’s no ground setting. We don’t know what the social situation is in the area where these characters live. At one point, one of Suada’s daughters calls the police and says she’s “been kidnapped by gays.” Are these characters living in a country where being gay is a crime? Is their living situation – multiple adults in the same house – a crime? Some context would have been appreciated.
On a more technical note, “Housekeeping for Beginners” is shot in the Academy ratio, giving a more intimate, claustrophobic view of the characters and their environment. In another similarity to “Of An Age,” Stolevski opts for framing that isn’t aesthetically pleasing. The camera constantly moves, weaving and bobbing as it zeroes in, evoking the verité-style of documentary filmmaking. I didn’t care for the camerawork here despite thinking it worked for the story being told.
Ultimately, Stolevski’s movie examines the familial unit. What does it mean to be a family, and, in this particular instance, how does a family manage to stay together? I found this to be an improvement over “Of An Age,” yet I never really warmed up to it or found myself completely absorbed in the story. Plus, I think Stolevski makes the viewer work a little too hard here.
In Theaters Friday, April 12th
