Rosebush Pruning has many flaws, but gives us an uninhibited Pamela Anderson and Callum Turner

According to the production notes for Rosebush Pruning, the new film by Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz is very, very loosely inspired by Fists in the Pocket, Marco Bellocchio's groundbreaking 1965 debut film. It is the morbid family setting of the story that at least partly recalls that disruptive title, which featured a young wealthy man afflicted by epileptic seizures who plotted to kill his blind mother and members of his own family, in order to “free” his older brother from the burden of caring for everyone, allowing him to enjoy life with his girlfriend.

Slaughter among the super-rich

This is more or less the premise of Rosebush Pruning, which sees Jamie Bell in the role of the brother capable of navigating the world, good and deserving of making a life for himself away from the toxic dynamics of his more-than-dysfunctional family, at least according to the highly questionable judgment of the protagonist Ed. In place of the blind and submissive mother, there is Tracy Letts as a blind family patriarch who loves to scandalize those around him, at times possessive and despotic. His four children who still live with him are already millionaires thanks to the death of their mother (Pamela Anderson), whose inheritance they divided after a pack of wolves attacked and devoured her. The woman's character hovers over the family from the opening, having left New York for a luxury villa on a Spanish hilltop, where its inhabitants do nothing but ride horses, talk about music and fashion brands, buying accessories and clothes from very expensive brands selected without any taste, from which they derive purely consumerist pleasure.

Bellocchio's family was also quite affluent, but here we are in a completely different social class, which will have an enormous impact on the story told by the film: we are in the ultra-rich millionaire upper bourgeoisie “stuck” in a meaningless existence, devoid of deep desires or things to do, given that all the protagonists are so rich and disconnected from society that they have no human relationships outside of those sinister ones with other family members. Rosebush Pruning, in short, is yet another film fascinated by the radically different lives of those who are so rich that they are not subject to society's rules and rhythms, just as happened with Succession, The White Lotus, Triangle of Sadness, and so on.

The film opens with the protagonist, played by Callum Turner, who is touched by an encounter with a Greek tourist: the tourist talks about ancient history, Turner shows him his expensive shoes. In some way, Ed, the film's narrator, realizes he is also physically attracted to the man, but despite having the financial means, he does nothing to stay in contact with him. Ed is both an unreliable narrator and dumber than he himself realizes, who refuses to drive (he hitchhikes) or use the written word (he has his sister write and read what's necessary for him), inventing strange proverbs and cultivating roses in the family garden. These are specious and bizarre hobbies for a young man who, never having confronted the world, is extremely childish.

For some reason, he is convinced that only his brother Jack deserves to survive and, after meeting Jack's girlfriend Martha (Elle Fanning), he decides to prune many branches of the “family rosebush” that hinder him, including himself. Ed, in fact, does not consider himself much better than his brother Robert (Lukas Gage) or his sister Anna (Riley Keough) who seem to even physically desire Jack, unlike him. Unlike Bellocchio's film, Rosebush Pruning very early on instills in us the doubt that Jack is also a social misfit, who will probably end up replicating the toxic dynamics built by his father, appearing both submissive and unable to understand when he is being exploited, or perhaps uncaring of it.

More Lanthimos than Bellocchio

Partly due to the extreme dysfunctional cynicism of the family depicted, partly due to the icy and super-rich context, the film closely resembles Yorgos Lanthimos's family films much more than Bellocchio's work. After all, it was written by Efthimis Filippou, the Greek director's trusted screenwriter, whose influence on the final product is all too evident. The main flaws of this film seem to be attributable to a script that, rather than revealing the true nature of the characters, changes direction in an incomprehensible way: Martha goes from being innocent to being a copy of the other manipulative female characters in the film, and it's unclear why or how. There are some interesting insights, especially regarding the characters of Turner and Pamela Anderson's mother: the two were clearly not emotionally connected, but they have a lot in common and, ultimately, they are the ones who somehow tried to build a life outside the family. This is why the very easy and conventional ending reserved for the protagonist is disappointing, when a better suggestion was within reach: why not make him, with all his naivety and stupidity, the one capable of relating to the world?

Another comparison the film evokes, in an absolutely unexpected way, is that to Emerald Fennell's cinema. Efthimis Filippou's screenplay, closely followed by Karim Aïnouz's direction, openly hunts for scenes constructed to create a certain shock value. Shocking passages that flirt with the forbidden have almost become the signature of the director of “Wuthering Heights”. Unfortunately, this film resembles her terrible Saltburn precisely in how the provocation is an empty stylistic exercise juxtaposed with a portrait that aims to be caustic of the richest of the rich, but which feels old, déjà vu. Rosebush Pruning adds nothing more to the brutal analyses of the directors Bellocchio looked to when writing Fists in the Pocket, Luis Buñuel and Michelangelo Antonioni, who, incidentally, at the time snubbed the debut of an Italian director who admired them so much.

Karim Aïnouz is more than a commissioned project

It's hard to say who Karim Aïnouz admires here, given that the directors and stories this film looks to are far from his cinema, which is always capable of change, but always extremely personal, strong in colors, tones, and events, more inclined to stories of those living on the margins than those living at the top of society. Karim Aïnouz's presence is probably what makes Rosebush Pruning still decent, thanks to the vivid colors of his cinema, his audacious vision (Ed's dream with flying shoes recalls Todd Haynes' Poison), his ability to direct actors tackling unusual roles. The film seems primarily constructed to allow Turner to confront a sinister character and showcase his talent (evident for some time, in much more conventional projects), but Anderson and Letts also bring out the best from a screenplay that often doesn't pursue the best or most interesting solution, but the most impactful one.