If you’ve ever wondered what a 1965 Italian black comedy might resemble when filtered through the divergent contemporary film styles of Greek extremity and tropical decadence, “Rosebush Pruning” has you covered. Premiering in competition at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, director Karim Aïnouz’s art-house mashup answers a question keeping at least a few ardent Mubi subscribers awake at night — though those hoping for something more than a particularly impish remix may well leave befuddled.
Still, a cast boasting Callum Turner, Riley Keough, Elle Fanning and Pamela Anderson will no doubt draw eyes, and a visual palette bathed in Catalan sunlight and high-end fashion should keep them there — even if this self-described social satire ultimately has little more on its mind than the notion that the beautiful can be the most ugly, and vice versa.
Written by Efthimis Filippou — whose collaborations with Yorgos Lanthimos helped define the so-called Greek Weird Wave — and directed by a Brazilian sensualist and visual artist long intoxicated by texture and touch, “Rosebush Pruning” assembles an unlikely crew to revisit Marco Bellocchio’s “Fists in the Pocket.” That earlier film – spoiler warning – followed a troubled young man who, well, takes to pruning the thornier members of his dissolute clan. This update keeps the same broad strokes, all while cranking up the volume, intensity, depravity and visual design to diminishing returns.
Here, Callum Turner leads as Ed, scion of a wealthy expat clan living large in the hills above Barcelona. To say that Ed and his siblings — Anna (Riley Keough), Jack (Jamie Bell), and Robert (Lukas Gage) — are “too close” would be an understatement, especially given their shared taste for bombast. Too rich ever to work and too depraved to channel their desires beyond the family, these idle aesthetes have built a hermetic, Hermes-draped world with no use for subtlety. They even go so far as to drop off a sacrificial lamb each month at the grave of their late matriarch (Pamela Anderson).
That Anderson appears beyond flashbacks hints at darker schemes, as does the theatrically helpless presence of the family’s patriarch, played by Tracy Letts. Already blind for some time, the unnamed father wields his disability as a tool of control — a patriarchal power bottom in a family-wide game of dominance and submission. The arrival of Jack’s new girlfriend Martha (Elle Fanning) threatens to upend that scheme – especially once the young woman manages to convince her beau to find a new perch beyond the family nest.
From another screenwriter’s pen, Martha might invite comparisons between the doe-eyed outsider and the family’s sacrificial lambs. Here, however, the film carries the same acrid social vision as “Dogtooth” — leaving no room for daylight. Martha isn’t much better than the rest of this rotten lot; she’s simply new to the game.
Up to now, filmmakers like Yorgos Lanthimos have paired that corrosive vision with a clinical, often bemused shooting style, creating a sense of remove. Ainouz, by contrast, is a melodrama maximalist: a filmmaker born in the tropics, with a keen penchant for color, carnality, and everything that verges on the overripe. Ainouz and DP Hélène Louvart revel in the film’s many surfaces, from the sharp angles and cut-glass edges of the family’s modernist home to the same striking geometry of Callum Turner’s face.
The filmmakers may disdain their subjects as beacons of decadent vapidity, all while sharing a reverence for the characters’ eye-popping wardrobes overflowing with Miu Miu, Bottega, Balenciaga, and Chanel, producing a film that often reads more as a self-admonishing pictorial than as genuine satire.
While casting such a rotten lot as both terrible and wonderful has worked in other films, “Rosebush Pruning” stumbles by doing so while doubling down on its hermetic seal. These characters breathe such rarified air — so peculiar, heightened, and idiosyncratic long before the narrative forces them to start consuming one another — that they ultimately resemble nothing else. You can only linger so long with such a parade of oddities making ever stranger choices before your eyes grow weary of gawking at a pageant of hideous beauty, and you start checking the clock.
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