‘Housekeeping for Beginners’ Asks: So What Is a Family, Anyway?

“In family life, love is the oil that eases friction, the cement that binds closer together, and the music that brings harmony.” (The quote is from Friedrich Nietzsche, but don’t hold that against it.) When it comes to the group of folks living under the same North Macedonian roof in Goran Stolevski’s Housekeeping for Beginners, those same sentiments apply, though we’d amend that it’s a shared animosity toward the world supplies the lubrication and the bonding, while the music that’s bringing them harmony consists of Euro-techno you’d hear at 4 a.m. on the dance floor. When we first get dropped into this collective’s living room, a gaggle of young folks is jumping around enthusiastically to one such banger while a six-year-old is rocking out behind a toy keyboard. It’s a party, already in progress. Then the grown-ups enter, the screaming starts, and it’s apparent their mutual love language amounts to different ways of saying “Fuck off.”

We’re less than a minute into this melodrama, and Stolevski is already blurring the lines between affection and anarchy, obscene language and liberated bliss. Then we start to formally meet the gang. That guy with the pouffy blonde do who is orchestrating the ass-shaking is Ali (Samson Selim). He’s 19 years old, and technically, he doesn’t live there; it’s just that Toni (Vladimir Tintor), one of the few adults in residence, told the him he could stick around after they hooked up via Grindr. The other teen is Vanesa (Mia Mustafa), the dictionary definition of a defiant juvenile delinquent. That adorable and hyperactive kid, Mia (Dzada Selim), is her little half-sister.

Their mom, Suada (Alina Serban), initially comes off as a walking, talking human scowl — you can see where Vanesa gets the 10-ton chip on her shoulder from. Her fuse isn’t short so much as microscopic, and her default mode is “attack.” The three of them are Romani, as is Ali. It’s both a point of pride with Suada and a sore point, given that racism against the Roma remains rampant in Skopje and she doesn’t want her children to suffer the slings and arrows of prejudice like she did growing up. The owner of this domicile is her girlfriend, a Balkan social worker named Dita (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days‘ Anamaria Marinca). Add in a couple of LGBTQ+ teens from the neighborhood in need of shelter, and the house is essentially part all-inclusive safe space, part island of misfit toys.

Compounding all of this household hurly-burly is the fact that Suada has stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Because she has no reason to trust the medical system — who, as we witness early on, are just as biased against the Romani as any other institution — she’s not exactly embracing the idea of treatments that only put off the inevitable. What Suada does want is for Dita to raise her children and look after them when she dies. If her girlfriend can give them her surname as well, to help them pass a little easier in “polite” Macedonian society, all the better. Threatening to slice open a vein while the couple is at the hospital, Suada forces her partner to agree to everything. Then we suddenly cut to a funeral. She’s gone. And “Mama Dita” and a reluctantly enlisted Toni have to figure out how to keep custody of the kids and help them endure their grief.

If this film had been made in the 1970s or ’80s, you’d assume all this domestic strife and eventual navigation of treacherous bureaucratic byways would be at the service of a social satire, if not an outright attack on the state. It’s still a political film — you can’t say that an extended sequence shot in Shutka, a municipality run largely by the Romani as a self-sustaining haven, isn’t political at all. And Stolevski does indeed take a few jabs at the powers that be, noticeably in that doctor’s office sequence where Suada’s dickwad of a physician nearly gets attacked with his own telephone. There are moments where you can feel him channeling the spirit of Emir Kuristurica, the Oscar-nominated Serbian filmmaker whose sometimes boisterous, often blackly comic films seamlessly wove the funny, the tragic, the cutting, and the carnal together while paying attention to those Eastern Europeans living on the fringe. (That detour into the Romani village feels like it might have been lifted out of Kuristurica’s wonderful 1998 movie Black Cat, White Cat.)

But Housekeeping for Beginners is less about taking those to task who’ve made this makeshift family’s life difficult, or how a number a systems have failed them along the way. It’s far more concerned with exploring what constitutes a “family” in the first place. Toni, it should be noted, is happy to live in proximity to Suada’s brood and the various hangers-on who lounge on the couch and join their dinner conversations. But he has no interest in the responsibilities of parenthood thrust upon him, and wants nothing more than to breeze through life one love-’em-forget-’em tryst at a time. The fact that the kids love his latest Tindr date is what has kept Ali still in their orbit, yet the 19-year-old is arguably the most nurturing presence around. They need him, and he needs them. Vanesa wants to live with her Romani grandmother or, better yet, run off to Malta with some guy she met on the internet. She’s sick of this Balkan woman telling her what to do. Mia just hopes all the grown-ups will stop swearing.

And yet, thanks to Mama Dita’s steadfast refusal to let this patchwork quilt of a clan be torn apart by social services, hormones, and an abundance of in-house rage, these outcasts all manage to circle their wagons when they need to. As with her deservedly praised turn in 4 Months, Anamaria Marinca embodies the concept of grace under pressure onscreen here, the hub in which all of these bent and/or near-broken spokes converge. Even when Vanesa acts out by calls the cops on her guardian — “Hello, I’ve been abducted by a cult of gays!” she screams at a 911 operator — you see how quickly and efficiently Dita springs into action, in order to present a united “nuclear family” front. Forced to track the teenager down when she goes missing, Mom 2.0 rallies the troops and leaves no potential thread untugged. She truly is mother, in every sense of the phrase.

Detente may be a necessity for survival, and before the final series of shaky-cam shots and messily composed tableaus, you realize that stability may be a never-quite-realized dream for this group. Like Dita and her wards, the movie itself constantly feels on the brink of falling apart. Yet Stolevski also underlines the fact that these people are there for each other, whether they like the situation (or each other) or not. Housekeeping for Beginners will not tell you much about keeping order amidst domestic chaos, per se. It is a primer, however, for turning a house into a home. The music may now sound folkier than that earlier techno. But the lubrication and cement — the love itself — needed to make them a family is now abundant.