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The other adults in her house — Suada (Alina Serban), Dita’s Romani girlfriend, and Toni (Vladimir Tintor), a gay man who works the night shift at an asylum — don’t help with the bills. But they do contribute to the noise. Suada comes with two daughters from previous relationships, troubled ninth-grader Vanesa (Mia Mustafa) and 5-year-old spitfire Mia (Dzada Selim), and Toni cycles through young hookups. His new boyfriend is a homeless 19-year-old named Ali (first-time actor Samson Selim, fantastic) who, surprisingly enough, is the closest thing the place has to a calming influence. Ali spends his first night straightening the crooked art on the walls.
We’re supposed to pick up on the fact that Dita’s house, which she inherited, is uncommonly large, but the claustrophobic cinematography sticks so close to the actors, it’s hard to see past their faces to the furniture. Naturally, it’s impossible to find silence or keep secrets; scene after scene climaxes with someone cursing and storming away. The rare moments of lightness are a welcome relief, say when Suada and Ali crack jokes about the horse exorcists and vampire hunters they knew back in Shutka. They’re relieved they’ve escaped, and when the film finally goes outside to visit Suada’s mom, we see why.
Dita’s roommates are united by being either Romani, queer, punk or all three. By proximity, they’re embedded in one another’s lives. (There’s only one working bathroom.) Yet their ties are fragile. In Macedonia, being gay isn’t criminal, it’s just not publicly done. But it is illegal for the queer couples to wed or adopt children. Ali, whom Mia comes to rely on like a sibling, figures he’ll eventually leave to marry a woman. And he and the others are tempted to flee to any country in the European Union. Except Malta, which Ali snobbishly jokes is like Italy’s vomit.
Everyone limps along in a class system that ranks Toni, a Macedonian, above Dita, an ethnic Albanian, and forces the Romani characters to the bottom. If it’s not apparent who is what, Stolevski muddles things more by casting talented leads who aren’t from either place to begin with. (Tintor is Serbian; Marinca, Romanian.) We eventually catch up. But these divisions matter — and become terrifying hurdles when Suada, who is terminally ill, forces Dita to mother Vanesa and Mia — and, if possible, rebrand her orphaned girls as Macedonian. Suada handles her fate with such aggravating, mulish, relentless, impossible-to-be-around rage that, at the risk of sounding uncharitable, it’s a relief when she exits after the first act.
Stolevski hurls us into the story and hopes that we’ll catch on to these social intricacies. He wants us to acknowledge that while Dita’s home is hot-tempered and loud, her co-workers’ closed-mindedness and Shutka’s hardscrabble desperation are worse. Compared with the alternatives, he insists — and we come to mostly agree — this maelstrom is actually an oasis worth defending. (Only Vanesa, in the overconfident flush of early teenagerdom, claims she’d be happy to move back into her mother’s old shack and get married, like, now.) The film toys with conformity. If Stolevski’s country claims to value the heterosexual nuclear family over all, he’ll force his characters into a facsimile of it — fake certificates, fake rings, fake happiness — and then ask again if that’s the right choice.
The film strengthens as these complexities emerge from the confusion. By the end, we’ve soaked up something of modern Macedonia and had our own cultural standards put to the rack: Are we rooting for a teenager to keep dating a 40-something man? Would we give a 14-year-old a cigarette to keep the peace? Compared with the shrieking alternative, the uncomfortable answer is … maybe?
R. At area theaters. Language throughout, some teen drinking and sexual content. In Macedonian, Romani and Albanian, with subtitles. 107 minutes.
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