Rosebush Pruning is one of those films where you’ll say to yourself at the end: what the hell have I just seen? And not in a good way. It’s about a wealthy family who are into fratricide, parricide, incest and blood. No quiet evenings playing Trivial Pursuit or charades for this lot. Mercifully, it is only 90 minutes long but, on the other hand, there are images you won’t be able to scrub from your mind for a lifetime. Swings and roundabouts, my friends, swings and roundabouts.
Inexplicably, it has a knockout cast: Callum Turner, Jamie Bell, Tracy Letts, Pamela Anderson, Riley Keough, Elle Fanning, Lukas Gage. (You will want to pull each aside to ask: ‘Why? Did you piss off your agent?’) The family are preposterously rich Americans who have decamped to a magnificent hilltop villa in Spain. The father (Letts) is blind, while the mother (Anderson) was torn apart by wolves in the forest, supposedly. But they do have a naked, crouching statue of her in their courtyard to remember her by, which is touching. I do hope my family will do the same for me one day.
When it comes to the eat-the-rich genre, this does make Saltburn look like child’s play
There are four kids: Jack (Bell) is the oldest and favoured son, while Edward (Turner) is obsessed with designer labels – he even dreams of Bottega loafers floating in the sky – and invents his own proverbs. What do we think of this one? ‘People love roses. Rosebushes are family. Families need pruning.’ Could do with some work I think. Their sister, Anna (Keough), wears baby blue go-go boots and comes on to the local butcher who, she swears, is excited by how he can sniff out her menstrual blood. But she is not in love with the local butcher. She is in love with Jack, as is the epileptic youngest son, Robert (Gage). Both do what they can to entice him sexually, while you’re looking into your lap and praying for it all to be over.
To the extent that there is any plot it comes in the form of Jack, who plans to break away from the family, which they find an intolerable prospect. He has a girlfriend, Martha (Fanning), and wants to live with her. At lunch his siblings deride her fashion choices – Zara and Cos, ugh! – and describe her breasts to their father, as per his request. (They are ‘average at best’, says Anna.) Martha is not put off. Whatever world this is, she is part of it. Their father, meanwhile, has a nightly toothbrushing regime that turns sexual and which you won’t be able to scrub from your mind during this lifetime or even the next. When it comes to the eat-the-rich genre, this does make Saltburn look like child’s play.
The film is directed by Karim Ainouz, who made Firebrand (about Henry VIII and his stinky leg, you may remember), and has a screenplay by Efthimis Filippou (best known for his collaborations with Yorgos Lanthimos). It is loosely inspired by Marco Bellocchio’s Fists in the Pocket (1965) but while that was a dark satire on the bourgeoisie and the Catholic church, if this had something to say, it completely passed me by. We never learn how these characters were formed, what it is they are seeking, or where any psychological truths might lie. And as events turn murderous – as the rosebush is pruned – it all seems as senseless as it is unearned. Add it all up and what you have is unpleasantness heaped on unpleasantness. I don’t know what might save it. Perhaps if it were trimmed by 90 minutes or so?
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