★★★★
A blood-licking, Balenciaga-worshipping clan rots beautifully in the Catalonian sun, before slowly turning on each other. Aïnouz and Filippou aren’t satirising the rich so much as gleefully trolling the room with a bad-taste pop-art fever dream.
Turning up for this SXSW London secret screening, I had my customary over-hopeful guess as to the programming. Might it be Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters? In the Barbican lobby I asked two or three fellow attendees. I Love Boosters they each said. In the auditorium the incomparable compare Rafa Sales Ross asked the audience, what do you think it is? I Love Boosters they all yelled, apart from the man next to me who said Avengers and then spilt a beer on himself. Anyway, it was Rosebush Pruning.
As a sociological experiment this turns out to have been the funniest decision of the festival. A roomful of people had talked themselves into believing they were about to see a very hip, wild and whacky maximalist takedown of Capitalism and The Man. What they got was ninety-five minutes of incest, blood-licking and designer knitwear delivered in the deadpan manner of a club kid with tertiary syphilis microdosing on K. I have never seen a screening deflate so fast.
Rosebush Pruning comes across, and indeed cums across, as if Todd Solondz had directed a mashup of Arsenic and Old Lace and The Royal Tenenbaums. It is never less than committed to its own bad taste.
A rich, white, American clan has installed itself in a modernist pile above Barcelona, where they revere the region as the birthplace of Balenciaga. (It isn’t.) Their blind patriarch (Tracy Letts) presides over four grown children who loaf in inherited luxury with little intention of leaving. Ed (Callum Turner) has taken up the invention of aphorisms as his main hobby, one of which hands the film its title. If people are roses, families are rosebushes- and rosebushes need pruning.
Rounding out the litter there’s also Jack (Jamie Bell), who slurps animal and period blood alike, treasures a pistol of the same model supposedly used on Gianni Versace, and hates eggplants; Anna (Riley Keough) who has sex with eggplants; and epileptic softheart Robert (Lukas Gage). The mother (Pamela Anderson, game as ever) has died, apparently eaten by wolves. Into this hermetic terrarium walks Martha (Elle Fanning), Jack’s new girlfriend, whom the household receives roughly the way an insufficiently dampened immune system receives a lung transplant.
Anyone who has seen Marco Bellocchio’s Fists in the Pocket, the 1965 debut from which this is loosely cultivated, knows where things will end up.
Rosebush Pruning belongs to the eat-the-rich-and-make-it-horny strain that Saltburn attempted to revitalise as a going concern, and it is openly bored by the moralising those films pretend to. There is no lesson here about wealth. There is barely a plot until the final act. What there is, instead, is escalation: incest, abuse, and casual psychopathy are all dialled up past the point of meaningful social comment and into pure provocation. Calling it satire feels generous. It is closer to a sustained, gleeful act of trolling, and on those terms it is gleefully obnoxious.
It is also very beautiful. Hélène Louvart shoots the Catalonian glare and the obscene clothes in a Pop Art saturation that makes vileness look like a fragrance ad. Matthew Herbert’s score thumps. The needle drops are immaculate, including two full-volume outings for the Pet Shop Boys’ Paninaro, a synth hymn to label-worship and shallow pleasure that the film takes entirely at its word.
The ensemble plays it with a wry deadpan glibness. Fanning in particular is working at a remarkable level. Her control of register, the way she flips unease into comedy and back inside a single glance, and the way she holds attention through stillness are a masterclass in the X-factor. And Callum Turner, draped in athleisure and emotional numbness, appears to have read this script and decided to completely immolate his Bond chances. Good for him.
Director Karim Aïnouz made the lovely, devastating Invisible Life, a film with a heart the size of a cathedral and a great deal more on its mind than Rosebush Pruning, which is a nastier, stupider and funnier film than his reputation would’ve predicted. Writer Efthimis Filippou previously scripted Dogtooth, and is here once again drawn to the idea of a sealed family unit and the rot ticking away inside it. But Dogtooth flattered its audience with its measured tone and controlled aesthetic. Rosebush Pruning is a sun-drenched mockery of every decadent-family-eats-itself black comedy you ever saw, a happy moronic full stop on the whole subgenre. Go away, Saltburn. Farewell, The Talented Mister Ripley. Get lost, Teorema. It wraps up in the most perfunctory way possible, as if to tell the audience to demand new ideas.
It will infuriate more people than it delights. I kept my giggles to myself and walked out of the Barbican with a skip in my step, as a range of irritated ticketholders filed past me into the cool summer air.
Rosebush Pruning played at SXSW London and comes to UK cinemas courtesy of Mubi on July 10