Housekeeping for Beginners

In lesser hands, this chaos might tumble into melodrama or farce. But Stolevski’s actors deliver such naturalistic performances, and he writes such specific dialogue...

By the end, we’ve soaked up something of modern Macedonia and had our own cultural standards put to the rack.

Stolevski creates a wonderful group of flawed but understandable characters and then illustrates just how brave they are as they pull together to negotiate and overcome treacherous encounters.

Stolevski obviously wants us to sympathize with these wounded characters who have been shunted aside by a cruel society, but that’s hard to do when they are so verbally cannibalistic.

Within “Housekeeping’s” restless, naturalistic aesthetic, Stolevski crafts complex and poignant images, contrasting the playacting the couple is forced to do with their searing gazes.

Housekeeping for Beginners dabbles in some common tropes: unlikely chosen families, a non-parent being forced to adjust to parenthood, and even a “white savior." But the film is successful because of the ways it complicates them.

Housekeeping for Beginners is Stolevski’s most intimate look at a family or family-like unit, but, for me, it’s his least engaging film by a long shot.

Stolevski's screenplay lurches from drama to drama you would expect in a large house filled with a collective thrown together by the social conditions of contemporary Europe.

A shambolic household takes shape as a family in a trial by fire all the sweeter for its transformative heat.

Cinematographer Naum Doksevski's handheld camera hovers so close to the actors that it seems almost to get beneath their skin; the film opens on a lounge room singalong, loud and unabashed, and barely lets up from there.