ksherwoodf A work of Great Genius, this coming of age film is beautiful, haunting, darkly comic. I love Local Hero but I think this is Bill Forsyth's masterpiece so far. It is about conformity, parenting, coming of age, making choices, madness, creativity, adulthood, tragedies that every family endures, riding on trains, family traits and how they are passed down,living in a small town, life, death, boy scouts doing their good deed for the day, the many uses of newsprint ... the list goes on and on. In short, it is about everything and works at many levels, as a Great Film should. And this is a Truly Great Film, high on my top ten list of favorite films of all time. It is perfectly written, directed and filmed by Bill Forsyth of Scotland, and it includes a great performance by Christine Lahti and also by the supporting cast (esp. those who play her nieces). There is not a bad note in this film, it is a perfect film in every way, to my eye.I understand why some commentators give this film a low rating -- they came looking for a comedy, or for the light melancholia of Local Hero (also a wonderful movie and one of my favorites). Housekeeping is dark melancholia, but it is also deeper and richer of a brew -- kind of Bergman with a sense of humor, in its vibe (though not its plot) it reminds me of another coming of age film, To Kill a Mockingbird, and it is of that film's high caliber.This film is woefully under-appreciated in the U.S., I hope it is released on DVD soon. It deserves another chance to be recognized for what it is -- one of the greatest films of a generation. And I so hope that Bill Forsyth, still relatively young in his early sixties, gets back to writing and directing. His films are wonderful but too few. I really want to -- NEED to -- hear more from Mr. Forsyth, I feel his absence deeply, it is as if Yo-Yo Ma or Heifitz put away their fiddles after a few great concerts, and played no more. Please come back, Mr. Forsyth!

goltermann I wish this movie were available on DVD!!!Christine Lahti does her typically superlative job of depicting a woman whose values come from the heart rather than deriving from the dictates of western civilization. As always, she expresses the best of the free spirit which I believe can be found in any one of us.Two young sisters end up in the custody of their aunt Sylvie, who has spent her life having abandoned the trappings of western civilization in general and of consumerism in particular.In order to support her young nieces, Sylvie returns from the wild, so to speak, and helps to raise the girls in a manner which allows them to see the freedom of disassociation from society and its dictated "norms".

garko-1 great film, but probably the most misrepresentative ad campaign i've ever seen for a movie. this is NOT a comedy. Christine Lahti's Sylvia is NOT a one dimensional free-spirit. she is disturbed, as is the entire family. this translates perfectly from the book, as does the film's look and emotional atmosphere.as for the opinion that Sylvia is a Pied Piper, that's just wrong. she could care less if anyone follows in her path. it just so happens that her niece is seduced by virtue of what i would interpret as instinct. the family has a long history of breaking from the norm, much to its detriment. the niece is merely fulfilling her filial destiny.to say that the story presents a polemic about nonconformity shortchanges the viewer from the complexity of emotions that it evokes. there is no argument. this is just the way things turn out for these folks. and in my opinion, the ending leaves us questioning, just as it does in the book, how much control we have over destiny.

Jonathan Dore For a director as accomplished as Bill Forsyth, this film, while not without its charming and interesting moments, looked puzzlingly like the rather earnest but gauche first feature of a recent film-school graduate. Most puzzling is the strangely under-developed script. To the exclusion of almost everything else, the film focuses on three characters (Aunt Sylvie and nieces Ruth and Lucille), and on the time when the action unfolds. Interaction with other characters is minimal, but more importantly, no depth or roundness is given to the leads by dialogue that would reveal something about their characters or fill in something of their back-story. We are left utterly in the dark as to the motivation for the apparently light-hearted suicide of the young girls' mother, Helen (this isn't a spoiler, by the way - it's how the film opens), and we learn nothing more about her during the film that would shed any light on the question. Similarly, we can discern (though it is never openly stated) that Sylvie has spent a lot of time hoboing, but the question of how this came about, and whether it was the cause or effect (or entirely unrelated to) the breakdown of her marriage, is never broached. Her husband, and Helen's husband (the girls' father), are also blank holes in the story, despatched with in one line of Sylvie's dialogue each. We learn absolutely nothing about Sylvie's relationship with her sister Helen, or with their parents. Most centrally, Ruth's almost complete lack of motivation in any direction (responding to every question with "I don't know" or "I suppose so") means that, dramatically speaking, the film has a blank at its centre. All this makes it pretty hard to sustain an interest in the film for two hours.This basic structural weakness of the script gives the film a flat, two-dimensional, untextured quality. The building-up of a sense of character through the amassing of information about them, and of a sense of place by the accretion of small details, are (with the exception of the much dwelt-on railway bridge) completely missing. These are things Forsyth certainly knows how to do - "Gregory's Girl" and "Comfort and Joy" both do them, delightfully, from beginning to end - which makes his involvement here all the harder to fathom.A fine performance from Christine Lahti, given the pretty thin material she had to work with. A minor quibble about the sound: with dialogue recorded on set and (as far as I could tell) no studio re-recording, some of the non-professional cast's mumbling delivery of the lines is hard to make out.