A Star-Studded Stink Bomb Lands in Berlin

ByBilge Ebiri,a film critic for New York and Vulture

8:00 A.M.

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Photo: Felix Dickinson

The new filmRosebush Pruning was inspired by Marco Bellocchio’s Italian classicFists in the Pocket (1965), and frankly, I think Bellocchio should be allowed to hunt the people who made it for sport. This garish cavalcade of perversions, which just premiered at the Berlin Film Festival,should have been shocking and transgressive; the pieces are certainly there. It puts an attractive cast — including Callum Turner, Riley Keough, Jamie Bell, and Elle Fanning — through a psychosexual wringer filled with incest and murder and betrayal and assorted bodily fluids. But it somehow makes its madness boring.

The movie portrays a deeply dysfunctional American family living in a huge house in Spain, where we’re told they moved six years ago from New York, because their mom (Pamela Anderson) loved Antonio Gaudi and the kids loved Balenciaga. Ever since mom was torn apart by wolves, the family has lived in splendor off her inheritance, with the kids taking care of their blind, judgmental father (Tracey Letts). The only sibling with something resembling a normal life is Jack (Bell), who is also not-so-secretly desired by his epileptic brother Robert (Lukas Gage) and his outwardly scheming sister Anna (Keough); she in particular is deeply envious of Martha (Fanning), Jack’s guitarist fiancée. To say more would be to remove some of the film’s shock value entirely, but let’s just say there’s more than mere longings to the incest, and that Jack’s life isn’t quite as “normal” as initially advertised.
Our protagonist and narrator, Edward (Turner), sometimes dreams of fleeing to Greece to spend time with an older doctor he met at a medical convention, but most of the time he dreams of fancy shoes and handbags. He tells us early on that he likes to make up mock-profound sayings that appear to reveal great truths but are essentially meaningless. “A banana falls down, no matter. A melon falls down, it’s over.” “People are roses. Families are rosebushes. Rosebushes need pruning.”

That these sayings are meant to reflect something both deep and asinine about the film itself is self-evident.Rosebush Pruning tries to be about something while pretending not to be about anything at all; it’s somehow both too stupid and too cool for the room. It was written by Efthimis Filippou, who co-wrote most of Yorgos Lanthimos’s craziest pictures, and some viewers will immediately be reminded ofDogtooth andThe Lobster, which happen to be masterpieces. And it’s directed by Karim Aïnouz, a Brazilian director who once made the heated, moving dramasMadame Satan andThe Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmãobut in recent years has faltered with works like the disastrousFirebrandand the atmospheric but tedious Motel Destino.These are talented men, in other words, and yet they seem like a poor match for one another’s sensibilities. Aïnouz can certainly frame a shot, but he’s not the kind of severe, exacting director this material needs; Lanthimos creates alternate realities, while Aïnouz is at his best in the muck and mud of our own world.

We can sense throughoutRosebush Pruning an attempt to explain, to contextualize, to somehow draw us into these characters’ madness. (Turner’s voiceover feels like it was tacked on later, perhaps as a catastrophic attempt to give us something to hold onto.) There are ideas here about class, about family, about desire and repression and money and patriarchy and freedom. But they’re all just floating nonsensically in the air, like the designer shoes Edward often fantasizes about.

The originalFists in the Pocket was a revolutionary picture. Its outrageous portrait of filial dysfunction came from Bellocchio’s own life, but it also arrived at a time when Italy’s boom years were winding down; it was a cinematic grenade thrown into the pious, conformist bourgeois attitudes of its era. Its jarring vision of family and class scandalized many and vaulted Bellocchio into the forefront of his country’s cinema. That’s because it was also put together beautifully: The young director had learned the lessons of Italian Neorealism as well as the French New Wave.Rosebush Pruningis only “inspired” by Bellocchio’s film, so it’s probably cruel to compare it to that classic. But it’s hard not to, because the earlier picture offers a devastating counterexample to the failures of this one. Bellocchio understood how to make all this lunacy compelling for an audience. You watch his film (which remains jagged and shocking to this day) despite yourself.Rosebush Pruning, by contrast, feels designed to annoy us and push us away. At least it succeeds on that level.