Just as Saltburn cemented the shtick of class satire onto its eye-watering Pinterest moodboards, Karim Aïnouz’s curiously engaging take on the hollow sex lives of the modern gentry prioritizes, at the first glance, its sheen and surface. One might be tempted to extract from this a thesis of self-referentiality — such is the world that the richest of us inhabit, an infinity of recurring postures and performances — and accord Rosebush Pruning more credit than it deserves. Like Emerald Fennell, Aïnouz (and writer Efthimis Filippou, in free-falling autopilot without his frequent collaborator, Yorgos Lanthimos) gesture at the consummate vanity and gaudy exhibitionism of a certain species of wealth, recognizing that their duty as profilers of said wealth would allow them, likewise, a free pass at indulgence. The loafers and entitled heirs of Rosebush Pruning belong to nothing but their immediate whims; their anthem is a hedonist one. “We’re all lazy, mediocre, vapid egotists,” muses Edward (Callum Turner), our disinterested narrator, in what must amount to a statement of quiet pride.
This pride, however, remains at arm’s length throughout the film, as Edward and his kindred, maladjusted siblings plot, peregrinate, and pass on barbs and bodily fluids alike among their cloistered household. Nestled somewhere in the Catalonian highlands in Spain, the American-born Taylor family had moved there sometime back at the behest of mom (Pamela Anderson), who we’re informed was mauled to death by wolves and lives on in the elusive shadow of Father (Tracy Letts, filling in as a true-blue Yank for Stellan Skarsgård). While younger brother Robert (Lukas Gage) and sister Anna (Riley Keough) have the time of their lives coupling up as a quasi-incestuous, co-dependent duo, the older brothers have other plans. Jack (Jamie Bell), the eldest, has a girlfriend (Elle Fanning) and wishes to escape the torpor of his enervating household and certain other filial duties. Edward, for all our closeness to him, remains a blank slate. Though he trades cock shots in the mail with a prior acquaintance and has mastered the art of vocal mimicry to some degree, the bored sybarite insists he has no aims beyond the immediate present. (“I don’t write. I don’t read. I don’t drive.”) Instead, his sole hobby consists of jumbling up nouns and verbs to come up with perplexing, sometimes profound proverbs for whoever his interlocutors are.
Rosebush Pruning is never quite boring, and even its stilted deliveries don’t quite rise to the level of turgidity. There is much for the eye to linger on in Hélène Louvart’s palette of high primary contrasts, just as the strings and beats of Matthew Herbert’s quasi-baroque, quasi-techno score serenade the ear in a non-stop bid for distraction. But peer beyond this texture and there is sparingly little in the way of psychological depth or even description. As a loose adaptation of Marco Bellocchio’s seminal Fists in the Pocket and an even flimsier materialist account of aristocratic perversion (with splashes of Balenciaga and Gaudí thrown into the mix), Aïnouz’s latest is a failure of curiosity, lacking even the unhinged giddiness of Fennell’s Americanized heartthrobs as they spit and splatter their way into self-recognition. Its characters, for the most part, thrive on the fringes of their ressentiment, unable to sublimate their urges or longings because they have shockingly few to really begin with. The title’s botanical suggestion — away with twisted beauty, away with the parasite class — interestingly comes full circle in one of Edward’s bizarre expressions as his own attempts to rid the family tree of its weeds end with nary a proper consequence: “Banana falls down, no matter. Melon falls down, it’s over.” Amid a splendor of painted ripeness, little in Rosebush Pruning bears fruit.
DIRECTOR: Karim Aïnouz; CAST: Callum Turner, Riley Keough, Elle Fanning, Jamie Bell, Lukas Gage, Tracy Letts; DISTRIBUTOR: MUBI; IN THEATERS: July 24; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 35 min.
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