Housekeeping

Housekeeping is the first film that writer-director Bill Forsyth has made outside Scotland. He should have stayed at home, just like Ole Bornedal, Lasse Hallström and so many other European filmmakers in recent years. The film is set in the 1950s and is about two closely attached sisters, Ruth and Lucille, who develop in different directions when Aunt Sylvie enters their lives. Sylvie returns to the town of her childhood to look after her orphaned nieces, but in fact it is rather the sisters who end up looking after Sylvie than the other way round. She is something of an eccentric who goes her own way. She is actually a good soul, but at some point Lucille rebels. She wants to be like the other girls. It ends with her moving in with one of her teachers, while Ruth slowly allows herself to be swallowed up by Sylvie's fantasy world. The rest of us do not, and that is probably the film's problem. Like the inhabitants of the village, I continue to see Sylvie as a nutcase, which is precisely the opposite of the director's intention. Unfortunately I was gripped neither by the characters nor by the rather undramatic plot.