More than 70 years ago, the still active director Marco Bellocchio made his directorial debut and thus directly created one of the most influential works of Italian cinema: “With a fist in his pocket”. Modernist and radically expressive in style, Bellocchio's film attacked the bourgeois morality of post-war Italian society, aiming primarily at the dismantling of the family. He did not depict this as a place of refuge or a stabilizing foundation, but rather as a sickly, claustrophobic construct in which psychological deterioration and violent destruction are gradually taking hold.
The Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz (“Motel Destino”) saw “With the Fist in the Pocket” during the Corona lockdown, a time in which isolation became a doctrine, in which the forced return to the private sphere revealed the cracks in our late capitalist order. With this material one could certainly tell something about the present, about the erosion of social shelters, domesticity as a class question, the integration of the personal into economic logics of exploitation. But “Rosebush Pruning” didn’t become that film.
The rich siblings Ed (Callum Turner), Robert (Lukas Gage) and Anna (Riley Keough) sit together on their father's estate.
Siblings Ed (Callum Turner), Anna (Riley Keough), Jack (Jamie Bell) and Robert (Lukas Gage) live in a luxurious villa in Spain with their blind father (Tracy Letts). Her mother (Pamela Anderson), or so it is said, was mauled to death in the forest by a pack of wolves some time ago. In the middle of the house there is a statue modeled on her naked figure, around which the remaining family regularly gathers. Once a month, the father and siblings also offer a lamb as an offering to the predators so that their mother's soul can rest.
Nobody has to work here, inherited wealth ensures that. The family structure is still inadequately described as “dysfunctional”: the often sexualized language in which the siblings interact with each other suggests, for good reasons, an incestuous closeness. Otherwise, the relationships are primarily transactional in nature; at the dinner table you talk about the luxury brands you wear. Nevertheless, no one comes up with the idea of questioning their existence in self-imposed isolation – until one day Jack brings home his new girlfriend Martha (Elle Fanning).
But if the family is like a rose bush – a metaphor that Ed, who likes to use self-invented proverbs, gives us from the voice-over – then you can only get away from it if the shoots are pruned.
Yorgos Lanthimos meets “Saltburn”
If you think of the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos while watching, you're right: the script was written by Efthymis Filippou, who also wrote the originals for, among other things: “The Killing Of A Sacred Deer” and most recently “Kinds Of Kindness”. Whether you know what to do with “Rosebush Pruning” certainly depends on your willingness to see more than misanthropic experimental arrangements in the cynical worldview and the sadism on display of the “Bugonia” maker. At the same time, the film can also be associated with the trend of eat-the-rich cinema à la “Saltburn”, which has become popular in recent years for good reasons – except that the system ultimately disintegrates itself (in a bloody way).
The diagnoses that “Rosebush Pruning” makes are as little wrong as they are simple: limitless material wealth results in inner impoverishment, the self-preservation instinct of the upper classes is a form of social inbreeding and is therefore perverted from the start. However, this does not result in any interesting perspectives. This is mainly due to the fact that the satire, which attracts with bright primary colors and booming sound design, only has one engine: contempt.
Music student Martha (left, Elle Fanning) shakes up the family structure.
The analytical sharpness of Bellocchio's role model is replaced by a repetitive freak show full of calculated border crossings in which, among other things, sperm, toothpaste and menstrual blood play a role. The film presents this with a penetrance, as if it were the first of its kind. Author Filippou has already ventured into similar areas in the more substantial “Dogtooth” (2009).
“Rosebush Pruning” allows neither itself nor its audience at least a spark of ambivalent fascination for the sophisticated, obscene activities of its staff. So in the end you're left with an obnoxious film about obnoxious people who you don't like watching because the verdict seems to have been made long ago from the start.
Conclusion: Rich satire full of clumsy provocative gestures – for everyone for whom the films by “Dogtooth” creator Yorgos Lanthimos have previously been too subtle.