Film Review Blog In the Defense of Housekeeping for Beginners

Housekeeping for Beginners (2023, North Macedonia, dir. Goran Stolevski) is a film I watched on a plane, very pleasantly surprised that the airline had a North-Macedonian queer Roma story, so a niche production, in its repertoire. The film moved me as I could relate to it on two levels: being a woman in a basically segregated, racist, homophobic and misogynistic Southeastern European (Romanian) society with a corrupted, failing state and contemptuous functionaries on the one hand; on the other hand, growing up surrounded by women who sacrificed their physical and mental health, repressed their own needs and longings to cater for their children, partners and elderly only to end up losing their lives to cancer and suicide, sometimes both. However, as a white, middle class heterosexual woman, homophobia, racism, and poverty are realities I only experience(d) from an observer’s perspective. 

On a personal level, I liked the film because it tells a universal human story of love, loss, community and overcoming. On an analytical level, I believe that, in spite of its shortcomings, it has the potential to inspire reflection and spark empathy among white, hetero-normative audiences, especially considering the (lack of) alternatives in the cinematic sphere.

The story revolves around a patchwork family in Skopje, kept together by social worker Dita, who opens her home to her gay friend Toni, her partner Suada and the latter’s two daughters Mia and Vanesa, as well as to three other teenage girls and eventually Ali, Toni’s young boyfriend. It soon becomes apparent that Suada is of Romani origin and that Dita met her while doing social work in Shutka. Their relationship is presented in subtle ways as they try to deal with Suada’s terminal illness. After Suada’s death, Dita struggles to honor her wish of Dita and Toni adopting Mia and Vanesa in order to change their Romani last name and thus give them a better chance at life in a profoundly antigypsyist society. The main conflict is subsequently acted out between Dita and teenager Vanesa, who rebels as a way to deal with the loss of her mother. They come to a resolution after undergoing the process of mourning which confronts them with emotions of anger, resistance, sadness, and acceptance, eventually reaching a common ground of how their relationship can work.

 

The characters: Rather than being the main character, Dita is a sort of enabler for the plot to unfold. She is a middle-class, white, closeted lesbian social worker who falls in love with one of her clients, a single mom of Romani ethnicity from Shutka. She goes to work, where she avoids her colleagues, and spends the rest of her energy trying to find doctors and treatments for her partner’s illness.  She is a restrained, quiet person who gets things done, so that the other inhabitants of the house can dance, sing, play, cry, love, and fight. Her attitude is, indeed, paternalistic, but not only towards her sick partner, whom she miserably fails to save, but towards everyone who lives in that house, including her male, grown-up friend. In short, she holds many of the characteristics of a middle-class, Southeastern European woman, who is used to repress her feelings and puts everyone else’s well-being first. It is only after Suada’s death and during the conflict with Vanesa that she starts cracking, losing her temper, smoking openly and showing more emotion, allowing the others a glimpse into her humanity.  

Suada, Dita’s partner and Mia and Vanesa’s mother, is a queer woman of Romani descent who grew up in Shutka. The audience meets her in a hospital, waiting to be addressed by a careless doctor who talks about the football game on the phone rather than seeing to his patient. The doctor’s contempt for another Romani person is the last straw, driving Suada into a fit of rage. She throws things around and calls the doctor out for his racism – a very human reaction in the face of powerlessness caused by illness and open discrimination. But Suada is not only justifiably angry and impulsive. She is also capable of joking around with Ali, of laughing childishly with her younger daughter, of sniffing her partner’s hair in a subtle, yet powerful declaration of love, of heartbreakingly crying and making herself vulnerable, of showing desperation at the thought of dying and having to leave her children. She begs Dita to adopt her daughters after she dies, thus hoping to set them up for a better future, and, although she was taken in by Dita and lives in her house, they always interact on eye level. 

In the short time she is with the viewer, Suada displays a broad range of human emotion. 

Her older daughter, Vanesa, is a strong minded, independent teenager, who befriends newcomer Ali right away, confiding in him, laughing and singing with him. Her mother’s death, however, leaves her feeling alone and confused; she rejects Dita, smokes, drinks, and picks fights at school. As part of her rebellious mourning process, Vanesa wants to leave Dita’s home and go to her grandmother’s in Shutka, but changes her mind about staying there. After a fall out with Dita, she returns to Shutka, joins a human trafficking rink in the hope of leaving the country for the EU, and becomes the victim of sexual abuse. Even though Dita eventually rescues her, the damage is done – she can’t save her, just like she couldn’t save her mother.  Through this experience, both characters come to the realization that their initial pretenses were false: Dita doesn’t have what it takes to be Vanesa’s mother and Vanesa needs someone she can rely on. After having mourned the loss of the same person by fighting, Dita and Vanesa go full circle. They end up saving each other and finding a way to move forward together.

Mia, Suada’s younger daughter, is the voice of truthfulness and reason. Nothing goes untaxed in the face of her childish, innocent bluntness. She is mature enough to play on her own, she expresses herself eloquently, holding everyone accountable for their words and actions. Although Dita seems to have been the one holding the household together, after Suada’s death, it is Mia whom everyone rallies around. They have to put aside their fears and differences in order to comfort her and ensure a stable environment in which she can grow and develop. Her success in doing so is apparent in the end: when she graduates first grade, everyone else graduates at life, having passed the tests and become wiser as individuals and stronger as a family.   

Ali is a gay young man from Shutka, who joins the household after having met Toni on a dating app. He immediately connects with the other inhabitants and is welcome to stay. He turns out to be a sensitive, loving person who patiently plays with Mia, becomes Vanesa’s confidant, jokes around with the non-Romani girls, has a sense of responsibility, and manages to soften Toni’s heart. He also displays a healthy amount of self-esteem and determination, refusing to accept his lover’s violent behavior, who comes across as bitter, grumpy, and quiet. To Toni, the only acceptable emotion for a man to show is anger and the only way he can express it is through violence. His is the voice of the dominant society that echoes stereotypes about Roma, insisting that Dita and Vanesa should not go alone to Shutka. Moreover, he feels entitled to inflict violence on Ali’s body by refusing to slow down during intercourse and hitting him in a fit of jealousy, which causes the latter to leave. Because Ali is not a victim. He won’t accept this behavior and is willing to return only after Toni undergoes his transformation and humbly apologizes. Their relationship is therefore a metaphor that symbolizes the power relation between majority and minority: in North-Macedonian society, most Roma people are mistreated and forced into segregation. For this relationship to heal, the majority has the responsibility to self-reflect and initiate change. 

The space where these individuals, marginalized by society for being either queer, orphaned, of Romani ethnicity or at the intersection of these characteristics, can unapologetically be themselves is Dita’s house, which they turned into their home. This is a protected haven they sometimes have to leave in order to engage with the system (work, hospital, school, court), majority society (Dita’s colleagues), and the Romani neighborhood of Shutka. The transition from the tranquility and safety of the house to the outside world is accentuated by the use of the bus and the car, by the lighting and atmosphere of these contrasting places as well as by the need for intermediaries: While Dita is the liaison to the system, Ali functions as a liaison to Shutka. Through the depiction of these two contrasting spaces, it becomes apparent they belong neither here nor there, but in their home, which is somewhere in between: “A dinner party with colleagues may as well be an expedition to outer space for Dita and Toni, who traverse the alien landscape of heteronormative conversation with fear and loathing."¹ 

And here is where the crux lies: 

One of the film’s clear intentions is to underline and criticize antigypsyism in a Balkan society and it does so not only through the story of its characters, but also by opposing the world of the majority to the world of the minority. The former is presented as an unsafe space for Roma and queer people, pictured through the interaction with the doctor and the dinner party. In contrast to the middle-class home, Shutka is portrayed as a place of poverty and crime. Whereas the film does employ the technique of authenticity through these images in order to evoke pity among viewers, it breaks with antigypsyist representations by giving Vanesa’s grandmother the center stage and allowing her to talk about her grievances, as well as the reasons for the depicted poverty and criminality. She expresses how being Roma in North-Macedonian society means being treated as less than human, marginalized and forced to live in polluted areas, which leads to a shorter life expectancy. By showing these images of poverty in Shutka, the film puts into artistic imagery what statistics have proven and what activists in Southeastern Europe try to raise awareness for. 

The cause for poverty and criminality is clear throughout the film: It’s not the affected people who are at fault, but systemic, institutional, and individual antigypsyism. It starts with not being granted the same rewards and chances for the same efforts in school, as Suada reminisces, which leads to poorer education and eventually hardship in getting well-paid jobs that would enable better living conditions. Moreover, the administration not only systematically neglects neighborhoods inhabited by Roma, it intentionally redirects pollution into these areas. 

Be that as it may, there’s no denying that Shutka is presented as a place people want to escape, a world of crime where Vanesa learns her lesson the hard way, thus giving the film a chance to show the lengths marginalized people would go to escape that antigypsyist society. As mentioned above, however, majority society is no picnic either. Not only does it show contempt and intolerance, it also has the power to intrude into spaces that are supposed to be safe for people to be themselves. In a homophobic society, when the police come to the house, the inhabitants are forced to “get rid of anything that looks gay”, to change their clothes and the composition of their family in order to resemble a middle-class heteronormative unit. Whereas Shutka is represented as poor and thus susceptible to criminality as a result of systemic antigypsyism, the representatives of majority society are depicted as intolerant and intrusive… because they can.  

The discussion around Roma issues and the intention to challenge clichés in this film might at times be subtle, but it is present. In their ironic or heated dinner-table conversations, the family talks about the appropriate denomination for Roma, and Mia holds anyone accountable who dares to use offensive terms; they joke about early marriage, and Toni implies it’s not safe for women to go alone to Shutka, but then, what do you know: the myth of teenage marriage is busted since no teenager actually gets married, and when they do arrive in Shutka, they are guided and helped by well-meaning people to find what they are looking for. Moreover, Ali’s sexuality, although ridiculed through friendly, yet homophobic banter, is tolerated in this neighborhood, whereas Dita needs to hide hers in white middle-class surroundings.

 

To sum up: A white lesbian with a savior’s complex opens her home to queer and straight adults and teenagers of both Romani and non-Romani ethnicity. Unlike in antigypsyist representations of Romani people, the Romani protagonists have diversified personalities, and their inner conflicts take center stage as they develop and display a complex variety of emotions. Even the youngest among them has a strong, determined and wise voice, whereas the non-Romani teenagers are the ones blurred into a supportive, yet rather faceless group. 

The stark contrast between fair, timid Dita and brunette, impulsive Suada established at the beginning is deconstructed as the plot develops: Suada is capable of more than justified anger, while Dita can also lose it, albeit in her weird, repressed way. In the safety of their home, she wears the same white sleeveless shirt Suada used to wear, but feels compelled to cover it up with a blazer when leaving that safe space in order to keep up appearances.

Through their romantic relationship and that of Ali and Toni, but also through the close friendship among the teenagers, who bicker constantly while at the same time supporting each other like siblings, the audience gets the valuable message that romantic, friendly, and parental relationships are possible between members of majority and minority (Herbert Heuss).

Nevertheless, the use of poverty imagery and Vanesa’s experience in Shutka remain weaknesses of the film, which tries to use the master’s tools in the hope of dismantling the master’s house. Whether it succeeds in doing so depends, of course, on the viewer’s expectations and positionality. To a broad, non-Romani public used to Kusturica’s carnivalesque representations of Romani people in Southeastern Europe, this film offers a sobering alternative: It underlines the characters’ humanity and diversity, representing them not as monolithic and static fairy-tale figures, but as complex people who are both victims of and agents in a discriminating system. And while this is the most basic thing in the world, when it comes to representations of Roma and all-encompassing racism in the Balkans (and beyond), this is unfortunately something that non-Roma audiences still need to comprehend.

 

Excursus: But what if the roles were reversed? Would the story still work if Dita were Roma and Suada not?

Well, we can answer this by reflecting on other questions such as: Wouldn’t any person patronize and try to convince their loved one to fight for their life? Would the doctor not talk on the phone, ignoring the patient? If you’ve dealt with a terminally ill person who has lost all hope and will to live and if you’ve had to do it in the framework of a Southeastern European healthcare system, you probably know the answers. Would she not have wanted her partner to take care of her children rather than give them up to the system? The issue of non-Roma children being adopted by a Roma person would have just been another way for the film to get to the same point: denouncing antigypsyism.

 

All this being said, do I think Housekeeping for Beginners is the perfect intersectional movie to end all stereotypes? Of course not. Despite its good intentions, it remains a production on the open market that needs to play with certain generalizations and preconceptions in order to catch and keep the attention of a non-Roma, non-queer audience. Moreover, it needs to ensure commercial success, which, in turn, means more visibility for the subjects it tackles, as well as for the filmmakers and Roma actors involved.

Therefore, from my positionality, my personal and professional background, and experience, using the tools of analysis provided by scholarly research in a comparative way, I do think that this film has the potential to convey to empathetic viewers the very basic but oh so necessary message that humanity resides in all people, regardless of ethnic background or sexual preference. Provided they’re prepared to receive it, of course. 

¹(Cited from: Sun, Michael: Housekeeping for Beginners review – a queer family’s fight to stay together, The Guardian 08.05.2024)

 

Dr. Andra-Octavia Drăghiciu