In case you’ve ever puzzled what a 1965 Italian black comedy may resemble when filtered by the divergent up to date movie kinds of Greek extremity and tropical decadence, “Rosebush Pruning” has you lined. Premiering in competitors at this yr’s Berlin Movie Pageant, director Karim Aïnouz’s art-house mashup solutions a query protecting no less than just a few ardent Mubi subscribers awake at night time — although these hoping for one thing greater than a very impish remix could properly depart befuddled.
Nonetheless, a forged boasting Callum Turner, Riley Keough, Elle Fanning and Pamela Anderson will little question draw eyes, and a visible palette bathed in Catalan daylight and high-end style ought to hold them there — even when this self-described social satire in the end has little extra on its thoughts than the notion that the gorgeous might be probably the most ugly, and vice versa.
Written by Efthimis Filippou — whose collaborations with Yorgos Lanthimos helped outline the so-called Greek Bizarre Wave — and directed by a Brazilian sensualist and visible artist lengthy intoxicated by texture and contact, “Rosebush Pruning” assembles an unlikely crew to revisit Marco Bellocchio’s “Fists within the Pocket.” That earlier movie – spoiler warning – adopted a troubled younger man who, properly, takes to pruning the thornier members of his dissolute clan. This replace retains the identical broad strokes, all whereas cranking up the amount, depth, depravity and visible design to diminishing returns.
Right here, Callum Turner leads as Ed, scion of a rich expat clan dwelling massive within the hills above Barcelona. To say that Ed and his siblings — Anna (Riley Keough), Jack (Jamie Bell), and Robert (Lukas Gage) — are “too shut” can be an understatement, particularly given their shared style for bombast. Too wealthy ever to work and too wicked to channel their needs past the household, these idle aesthetes have constructed a airtight, Hermes-draped world with no use for subtlety. They even go as far as to drop off a sacrificial lamb every month on the grave of their late matriarch (Pamela Anderson).
That Anderson seems past flashbacks hints at darker schemes, as does the theatrically helpless presence of the household’s patriarch, performed by Tracy Letts. Already blind for a while, the unnamed father wields his incapacity as a instrument of management — a patriarchal energy backside in a family-wide recreation of dominance and submission. The arrival of Jack’s new girlfriend Martha (Elle Fanning) threatens to upend that scheme – particularly as soon as the younger girl manages to persuade her beau to discover a new perch past the household nest.
From one other screenwriter’s pen, Martha may invite comparisons between the doe-eyed outsider and the household’s sacrificial lambs. Right here, nevertheless, the movie carries the identical acrid social imaginative and prescient as “Dogtooth” — leaving no room for daylight. Martha isn’t significantly better than the remainder of this rotten lot; she’s merely new to the sport.
To date, filmmakers like Yorgos Lanthimos have paired that corrosive imaginative and prescient with a medical, usually bemused capturing type, creating a way of take away. Ainouz, against this, is a melodrama maximalist: a filmmaker born within the tropics, with a eager penchant for shade, carnality, and every part that verges on the overripe. Ainouz and DP Hélène Louvart revel within the movie’s many surfaces, from the sharp angles and cut-glass edges of the household’s modernist house to the identical placing geometry of Callum Turner’s face.
The filmmakers could disdain their topics as beacons of decadent vapidity, all whereas sharing a reverence for the characters’ eye-popping wardrobes overflowing with Miu Miu, Bottega, Balenciaga, and Chanel, producing a movie that always reads extra as a self-admonishing pictorial than as real satire.
Whereas casting such a rotten lot as each horrible and fantastic has labored in different movies, “Rosebush Pruning” stumbles by doing so whereas doubling down on its airtight seal. These characters breathe such rarified air — so peculiar, heightened, and idiosyncratic lengthy earlier than the narrative forces them to start out consuming each other — that they in the end resemble nothing else. You’ll be able to solely linger so lengthy with such a parade of oddities making ever stranger selections earlier than your eyes develop weary of gawking at a pageant of hideous magnificence, and also you begin checking the clock.