I’m not sure what Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz and screenwriter Efthimis Filippou were going for with Rosebush Pruning, or the long list of talented actors who agreed to appear in it. The idea seems to be emulating Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, with its combination of sexy actors, pretty visuals, a weird, eccentric family and shocking sex that eventually gives way to similarly shocking violence.
But while Fennell’s film—it shares a scene involving the sexualization of menstrual blood—at least had audacity going for it, Rosebush Pruning is merely shock for shock’s sake. At times it’s like an early Yorgos Lanthimos film, especially in the way the characters speak in bizarre, stilted sentences that don’t sound like human dialogue. Which makes sense, since Filippou wrote several of Lanthimos’ weirdest films, including The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and Kinds of Kindness.
Based loosely on an Italian film from the 1960s called Fists in the Pocket, Rosebush Pruning concerns an entire wealthy family that’s relocated from New York City to a luxurious estate in Spain. Everyone has limitless money, although no one has anything resembling a job. Tracy Letts, called only “Father,” is the blind patriarch of the family, while Pamela Anderson (“Mother”) is the mother, who we’ve been told at the beginning is dead, devoured by wolves.
The children are played by possible future James Bond Callum Turner, Jamie Bell, Riley Keough and Lukas Gage, while Elle Fanning plays Bell’s girlfriend, who the rest of the family hates, although not enough to keep Letts’ blind dad from asking questions at the dinner table about her cleavage. There’s lots of incest, and various jealousies related to it.
No one is doing anything close to their best work, nor do any of the performers luxuriate in the material’s absurdity, the way some of the actors, especially Barry Keoughan, Rosamund Pike and Richard E. Grant did in Saltburn.
I guess the film is trying to make some point about the perfidies of the idle rich, but I don’t know; so many other films have gotten there first in the last few years, and Saltburn was much more effective at finding a way into that world.
Actors love to stretch, but I’d guess most of them would be happy to forget this one. Heartwarming as the Pamela Anderson comeback story has been, she was bound to appear in a terrible movie eventually.