It was reading about Fred and Rosemary West that convinced me children brought up in a disturbed family can be made to accept anything as normal. Others may take a more elevated route to a similar conclusion (Martin Heidegger coined the resonant term “thrownness”, Geworfenheit, to describe the way we arrive in a family, a language and a culture we have not chosen). But for me it was true crime, a genre I can no longer tolerate, that settled the question.
When I saw Yorgos Lanthimos’s breakout film Dogtooth (2009) calmly presenting a couple who have kept their three children within a fenced compound into adulthood, tricking them into believing absurdities such as that cats are the most dangerous of all creatures, the family dynamics didn’t seem surprising. Dogtooth was co-scripted with Efthimis Filippou who went on to work with Lanthimos on many of his best films about people dwelling in strangeness – Alps, The Lobster and, most recently, Kinds of Kindness.
Rosebush Pruning (not about rosebushes) is scripted by Filippou. It is a homage to the 1965 Italian classic about family dysfunction Fists in the Pocket, and is directed by Karim Aïnouz, the gonzo Brazilian-Algerian filmmaker whose 2023 English-language debut, Firebrand, presented Henry VIII as a ravening brute.
A rich, perverse American family has moved to a modernist villa in Catalonia. They’re all “lazy, mediocre, vapid egotists”, none of them needing to work, interested only in fashion and music.
Mum (Pamela Anderson – yes, the star of Baywatch and advocate for plant-based products) has disappeared, eaten by wolves – at least according to Dad, a blind, abusive patriarch (Tracy Letts). Each month, the family leaves a lamb out in the woods near a makeshift cross for the wolves to tear apart in her honour.
Our entry point into this bizarre unit is the middle son, Ed (handsome Callum Turner, Mr Dua Lipa, and possibly the next 007). Ed doesn’t read or write but likes thinking up his own inane proverbs (“Roses are people. Families are rosebushes. Rosebushes need pruning”). Ed is infatuated with his elder brother Jack (Jamie Bell: Billy Elliot, Half Man) and informs us: “If there was just one person in our family, just one, that deserves to live, that would be Jack.” His sex-mad sister Anna (Elvis’s granddaughter Riley Keough) is obsessed with Jack too, as is his queer, epileptic younger brother Rob (Lukas Gage, The White Lotus), to the point of carving into himself a gory, makeshift vagina in an attempt to seduce him, knowing Jack is turned on by blood.
Jack has upset this toxic setup by finding a girlfriend outside it. But Martha (a befreckled Elle Fanning) is a fairly nasty piece of work herself. “You couldn’t imagine how badly she dresses, Dad,” Anna whines. In the film’s best scene, Martha comes to lunch to meet the family and Dad insists on having her described to him: “What sort of handbag does she have?” Then: “And her bosom?”
So Ed starts pruning. Whereas Lanthimos delivers craziness coolly, even minimally, Aïnouz goes for gross-out. But the film so delights in indulging its own bad taste that it simply doesn’t work as a satire on family dysfunction, patriarchal tyranny, late capitalism, label mania or any other worthy target. There’s no context for the nastiness.
That’s not the case with its source material, the 1965 Italian film Fists in the Pocket (currently available on Mubi). This astonishing debut by the radical writer and director Marco Bellocchio, then in his mid-twenties, was a direct assault on bourgeois society, the Church, and the repressive family – in this case headed by a blind mother, not father. Otherwise the dynamics are much the same: one brother, Alessandro, stunningly played by Lou Castel (despite not speaking Italian and having to be dubbed) gets it into his head that he can help his admired older brother to freedom by dispatching the rest of the family, including himself. It’s shocking, angry and transgressive in a way that the excesses of Rosebush Pruning are not. But then 60 years ago, authority had not yet been discarded.
In 2022, the film critic and grader David Thomson named Fists in the Pocket one of his ten greatest films ever in a Sight and Sound poll. Many thanks to Rosebush Pruning for tipping me off to it.
Rosebush Pruning is in cinemas now
[Further reading: Ben Rhodes’ empty words]