It is hard to know what is true and what isn’t in “How to Clean a House in Ten Easy Steps,” an endearingly idiosyncratic tribute from filmmaker Carolina Gonzalez Valencia to her mother Beatriz, but when it takes a certain irrational belief to make the trek as the latter did from Columbia to America when she didn’t know a word of English or had much money to her name to build a life, exaggerating the end results doesn’t seem entirely inappropriate to honor the risks she was taking. While Beatriz is presented as a best-selling author for a memoir that gives the film its title and clearly isn’t real — based on notebooks that she may or may not have spent her early days in the U.S. jotting down details in — it’s an experience worthy of such attention that Valencia grabs with the unconventional approach to the story that is hardly uncommon but for every immigrant that has made the move, entirely unique.
Books were actually Valencia’s own way into making “How to Clean a House” when she describes being inspired by novels she read as young woman, offering insight into an experience that her mother rarely mentioned herself and the film retains a literary quality, being broken up into chapters and including herself as a bit of an omniscient narrator to counter interviews where her mother gets to speak in her own voice. Although Beatriz spent her childhood dreaming of being a singer, a lack of stability at home where both her own family and the generation before hers had trouble settling down when work was elusive in Colombia and after giving up her job to have children, she was obliged to part with them when she could make more money in Florida as a housekeeper to send back home to her husband who was taking care of them after his own job in the auto industry was shaky. While Beatriz is soft-spoken about such things, describing the past as “painful,” Valencia channels the dramatic effect they had on her into a more spectacular presentation, recreating memories as cartoons and giving Beatriz her flowers by pulling others around her into the mix to speak about the impact this fictional memoir has had.
Occasionally, the embellishment can lead to confusion when Valencia introduces real family members and friends whose role in Beatriz’s life aren’t exactly clear when prodded to vigorously endorse this fake book and chooses odd places to withhold certain information. But as the director recalls having “the luxury of questioning if I liked a job or not” as she sorted through her own line of undesirable gigs upon arriving in America when she could count on her mother to provide a cushion that she did not have herself, the fruits of that opportunity need not be verbally articulated when they’re expressed so exuberantly in the creativity that Valencia applies to making a cinematic experience. Even though her mother doesn’t paint a particularly rosy picture of being a domestic worker, the use of imagination to tell Beatriz’s side of the story while Valencia provides frank recollections of what it was like to live separately and wondering what her life in another country was like becomes movingly apropos. Freedom of the mind may get Valencia in trouble at times when there truly seem to be no bounds on where it will roam in “How to Clean a House in Ten Easy Steps,” but ultimately as a celebration of the strength it can provide to keep going, the director puts an unexpected spin on the idea that dreams do come true.
“How to Clean a House in Ten Easy Steps” will screen again at True/False on March 7th at 2:30 pm at the Globe and March 8th at noon at the Missouri Theatre.