A nuclear family has combusted and are now living in the fallout, carefully navigating around each other.  Matriarch Dita (Anamaria Marinca) is left to raise Vanesa (Mia Mustafi) and Mia (Dzada Selim), the two children of her girlfriend, Suada (Alina Serban), who was recently diagnosed with terminal cancer.  Meanwhile, her husband, Toni (Vladimir Tintor), has invited his latest Grindr hookup, Ali (Samson Selim), to live with them.  While tensions can be high almost all of the time, few households are more full of love than the one shared by this found family. 

Writer/director Goran Stolevski debuted Housekeeping for Beginners at the 2023 running of the Venice Film Festival under its original Macedonian title, Domakinstvo za Pocetnici.  The 107-minute drama went on to be submitted to the 96th Academy Awards but missed out on the final nomination, though it was granted a limited rollout from Focus Features in the United States after the ceremony.  The work is the most grounded full-length endeavor of Stolevski; a director who had his feature debut with You Won’t Be Alone (2022), a folk tale about our modern understanding of identity. He has not slowed his output since, and while the heart is still there, it seems he is a creative talent that thrives in self-imposed restraints and that the wide landscape offered to those crafting realist works led him astray.  Do not be mistaken, though, Housekeeping for Beginners still lands with an emotional punch and, even with its melodramatic tendencies, still leaves its audience in awe. 

Opening with a tense meeting with a doctor that highlights some of the racial tensions of the time, it places the film at arm’s reach from other hard-hitting films that seek to peel back the veil and expose the xenophobia that courses through various European communities such as Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Beasts (2023) or, more closely to home, Cristian Mungiu’s R.M.N. (2023).  It should come as no surprise, then, for viewers familiar with Stolevski, that themes of identity are coursing through his film, though this is the first of his features that deal with race and origin so directly.  Much of Housekeeping is still thematically shot and composed through a queer lens, challenging the antiquated laws that prop up the traditional family structure and whose supporters wield fear and religion as weapons against modernity which puts it back in context with Stolevski’s established lexicon of films searching for human dignity across all walks of life. 

From the doctor’s office, the film pivots to the homestead where Ali and Vanesa are lounging and singing along to music while Mia, the youngest by a wide margin, plays along with them.  It is chaotic, but just a tease of the frantic energy that is to come – one can be reminded of the race against the clock in the opening of Stolevski’s Of An Age (2023) – but before he really launches us headfirst into the fray, he slows down for a moment as Dita begins to process who this strange, young man is in her house.  Naum Doksevski’s camera never stills as Ali is cowering in the frame, shrinking from Dita’s icy stare as she pieces together who this boy is, standing in her living room, with nail polish on his fingers.  Relenting, she allows Ali to stay, and while his addition to the family marks a major turning point for them, it is the soon-to-be absence of Suada that will rock this unit to the core and force a major readjustment in their shared lives. 

Stolevski does not seem to be investigating with the usual laser focus here, instead opting for a more sweeping family drama and he seems to expect his audience to come into this film a little more prepared.  He brushes up against some minor themes of grief while the narrative also pushes no less than three other occupants of the house to the wayside allowing them to interject some comments during arguments, add noise to the overall soundscape, and fill out the frame.  It is not a knock against the ensemble cast, but they really struggle to break through the drama and the hubbub of the general house and make their mark as performers.  They serve their purpose at the moment and can act as a sounding board when any of our core cast are at their wit’s end, but it is a bit of sloppiness on Stolevski’s part that is highly unusual of him. 

While that aspect of the script can leave something to be desired, he teases out strong performances from his entire cast of largely new actors.  It is a common practice for the practical gain of bringing down the budget, but also for the adage that untrained actors can lend an air of authenticity to a film.  Directors run the risk though of a rigidness on camera that breaks the immersion and makes it even more apparent that viewers are watching a film and are not a fly on the wall. Stolevski manages to avoid that, here, forging a chemistry and a lived-in camaraderie among his cast. While for much of the film we are playing catchup along with the characters as life rushes by them, we do still feel that we are a part of it all.  We are welcomed into this film and this world as yet another one of Dita’s lost souls and we have faith in her that she will not let us fall too far behind.