It was reading about Fred and Rosemary West that convinced me that children growing up in a troubled family can be forced to accept anything as normal. Others may take a more elevated path to a similar conclusion (Martin Heidegger coined the sonorous term “throwing,” PLACINGto describe how we end up in a family, a language and a culture that we did not choose). But for me it was true crime, a genre I can no longer tolerate, that settled the matter.
When I saw Yorgos Lanthimos’ first film Dog tooth (2009) calmly presented a couple who kept their three children inside a gated compound into adulthood, tricking them into believing such nonsense as cats being the most dangerous of all creatures, the family dynamic seemed unsurprising. Dog tooth was co-written with Efthimis Filippou, who went on to work with Lanthimos on many of his best films about people who inhabit strangeness – The Alps, Lobster and recently, Types of Kindness.
Pruning the rose (not for rose bushes) is written by Filippou. It’s an homage to the 1965 Italian classic about family dysfunction Punches in the pocket, and directed by Karim Aïnouz, the Brazilian-Algerian gonzo director whose 2023 English-language debut, Firebrandpresented Henry VIII as a predatory brute.
A rich, perverted American family has moved into a modernist villa in Catalonia. They are all “lazy, mediocre, useless egoists”, none of them need to work, only interested in fashion and music.
Mom (Pamela Anderson – yes, the star of Baywatch and plant-based products advocate) is gone, eaten by wolves—at least according to the father, a blind and abusive patriarch (Tracy Letts). Every month, the family leaves a lamb outside in the woods next to a makeshift cross for the wolves to tear up in its honor.
Our point of entry into this strange unit is the middle son, Ed (handsome Callum Turner, Mr. Dua Lipa, and maybe another 007). Ed doesn’t read or write, but he likes to think up his own crazy proverbs (“Roses are people. Families are roses. Roses need pruning”). Ed is infatuated with his older brother Jack (Jamie Bell: Billy Elliot, Half Man) and informs us: “If there was only one person in our family, only one, who deserved to live, it would be Jack.” His sex-crazed sister Anna (Elvis’ niece Riley Keough) is also obsessed with Jack, as is his epileptic younger brother Rob (Lukas Gage, The White Lotus), to the point of carving a painful, makeshift vagina into herself in an attempt to seduce her, knowing that Jack is turned on by blood.
Jack has upset this toxic organization by finding a lover outside of it. But Martha (a freckled Elle Fanning) is a pretty badass job herself. “You can’t imagine how badly she dresses, Dad,” Anna complains. In the film’s best scene, Marta comes to lunch to meet the family and the father insists on being described: “What bag does she have?” Then: “And her breast?”
So Ed starts pruning. While Lanthimos coolly delivers madness, even minimally, Aïnouz goes for the benefit. But the film revels so much in indulging its 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 is no context for disgust.
This is not the case with its source material, the 1965 Italian film Punches in the pocket (currently available on Mubi). This stunning debut from the radical writer and director Marco Bellocchio, then in his mid-twenties, was a direct attack on bourgeois society, the Church and the repressive family – in this case headed by a blind mother, not a father. Otherwise, the dynamic is much the same: one brother, Alessandro, played amazingly by Lou Castel (despite not speaking Italian and having to be dubbed) thinks he can help his admired older brother to freedom by sending the rest of the family, including himself. It’s shocking, angry and transgressive in a way that the excesses of Pruning the rose they are not. But then 60 years ago, authority had not yet been overthrown.
In 2022, film critic and classmate David Thomson nominated Punches in the pocket one of his ten greatest films ever in a Sight and sound poll. Many thanks for Pruning the rose to inform me about it.
Pruning the rose it’s in theaters now
(Further reading: The idle words of Ben Rhodes)
