Rosebush Pruning, a film that needs ruthless pruning

The rich have a freedom to move, to make decisions, to act, and crucially, a height from which to fall. Drama can bring them low and it can be comic and tragic and both. We have our share of it in the cinema and at the Berlinale this year. 

America famously doesn’t have a class system. Its egalitarian system of wealth distribution means that while everyone is middle class, some are way, way, way more middle class than others.

Take the family at the heart of Karim Aïnouz’s Rosebush Pruning. They are stupid wealthy. Enough to never work, every desire is sated immediately; all consumption conspicuous. Deplorable amounts of money are spent on high fashion and kitsch art, including a nude statue of their mother (Pamela Anderson), who transferred the family from the States to Spain before being torn apart by wolves. As you do. 

It’s a wacky combination of Greek myth and daytime soap, written by Yorgos Lanthimos’ collaborator, Efthimis Filippou, and based loosely on Marco Bellocchio’s 1965 classic Fists in Pockets. Future James Bond Callum Turner plays Edward, who we first find on a beach, a Bret Easton Ellis character of pop cultural hyper-literacy who refuses to read or write but has learned to imitate his brother Jack’s voice perfectly because… plot. 

Jack, played by Jamie Bell, is the best of a rotten bunch compared to Edward and siblings Robert (Lukas Gage) and Anna (Riley Keough). Their blind patriarch (Tracy Letts) is perhaps the worst of all, especially when we learn his secrets of dental hygiene.

And Jack is the only one who seems to have a life outside their orbit, zipping to and fro in his sports car with the music blasting. He’s in love with Martha (Elle Fanning) and plans to move out of the postmodern family mansion.

But it isn’t as if Martha is a shining light of authenticity or down-to-earthness. She wants Jack to commit and buy a huge mansion for them to live in. There’s a grand guignol pleasure to be had in just how batty the film is and how enthusiastically pointless. 

“Transcendental nihilism” holds not only that there is no meaning, but that any attempt to find meaning is in itself damaging. Rosebush Pruning is joyfully hostile to any notion that it might mean anything. The family are so unreal; the situation so contrived; the story itself retconned from impressive looking tableaux.

Suggested Reading

The Gaza war comes to the Berlin film festival

Tanit Koch

Not giving a shit about the family is entirely appropriate, but it also extends to not giving a shit about the film. Think not so much Triangle of Sadness as Oblong of Meh. 

By the hour mark, I was bitterly regretting having sat in the middle of a row. Though I recalled the advice of a colleague: “If you hate a film, always stay to the end so you can hate it thoroughly.”  

Kornel Mundruzco’s At the Sea exists in a more recognisable, realistic world. Amy Adams plays Laura, a dance choreographer who is just out of rehab and has returned to her family’s Cape Cod summerhouse, where she slowly begins to reestablish her relationship with her artist husband Martin (Murray Bartlett), teenage daughter Josie (Chloe East, excellent in Heretic) and younger son Felix (Redding L Munsell). 

She is being pressured by investor Riann Wilson and her former assistant, Shawn Levy, to return to the head of her dance company, but feels haunted both by the lurking ghost of her own addiction and her memory of her borderline abusive father, played by Hungarian dancer Pal Frenak. We see her in flashbacks as a child and filmed with what looks like an Instagram filter called Periwinkle. 

I wonder if part of the problem is that the film is in American. If Hungarian director and his writer and partner Kata Weber had set it in their home country, it would be easier to understand the cultural standing of a dance company and forgive the way the film occasionally breaks out into – God help us all – interpretive dance. 

Laura’s recovery as well seems to exist in a more European milieu where there might be some reticence in talking about it. In America, having a stint in rehab, especially in these circles of wealth, is hardly shameful, whereas in some parts of Europe not being an alcoholic is considered a sign of weakness. Even the property porn of the summerhouse – we also spend some time in a mansion and on a yacht – would be easier to stomach if distanced by subtitles and constant smoking. 

Why is it that I can watch Eric Rohmer films and be totally forgiving of his wealthy characters, but in English, the same kind of people just get me riled? Or is it just now? Am I just watching this thinking, “angst-ridden privileged people? In this economy?” 

It doesn’t help that Laura doesn’t seem to understand the concept of bus stop or waiting room. Perhaps it’s also to do with the fact that addiction narratives are difficult to visualise and run along such familiar beats. Ultimately, watching someone not drinking isn’t exactly cinematic.  All the great films about alcoholism – The Lost Weekend, Days of Wine and Roses and Leaving Las Vegas – tend to be in the midst of it rather than in the aftermath. That’s why films about recovery tend to have a relapse scene just to buck things up.  

Whereas Rosebush Pruning doesn’t care about my feelings one way or the other and totally succeeds in provoking apathy, there is a lot that is human and good in At the Sea, almost all of which comes from Amy Adams. She is such a consummate actor and such a solid human presence that it’s a pity the film doesn’t live up to her. 

John Bleasdale’s novel Connery, about the life of Sean Connery, is published by Plumeria