Fest Track On Sirk TV Film Review: ROSEBUSH PRUNING [Berlinale - Berlin, Germany]
The context of black comedy with a touch of the strange is on full display with "Rosebush Pruning" [Competition], an unlikely dark perspective on the nature of family and identity shaped by denial and trauma. The film does well to cover its tracks in certain ways because, in not needing for anything, this group of would-be six always searches for something more but loses most of themselves in the process. Callum Turner stars as the would-be narrator Ed Taylor, a vapid boy man thinking himself higher thought than the rest of his vapid clan and yet is still so spectacularly ignorant. Turner has been making some interesting (if not offbeat) choices of late (see "Rose In Nevada" from Red Sea). Here he has some quite weird siblings, the most normal being Jack (played with an interesting reserve by Jamie Bell). The rest of the clan think he is perfect in a way but also loses the fact that he is the most bruised and yet understandably the most aware as time goes on. The mother (Pamela Anderson) died per se after being attacked by a pack of wolves in the Spanish countryside where they now live in a oceanside mansion after leaving America. Tracey Letts plays the blind patriarch who is really the cause of this all within his structure (but oddly enough the money doesn't seem to come from him). His darkness is both unnerving and pathetic (and Letts can play these men to a t).
Lukas Cage is the most confused and by extension the most tragic since his sense of persona has been corrupted or changed by others in a weird way leading to an unraveling that he can only follow even if lost. Riley Keough turns in an interesting play as Anna, a grown up girl lost in the trappings of what she is expected to be but also completely caught up in her own sense of importance and what she thinks she knows. Outside this plays Elle Fanning as Martha, Jack's would be love interest but even her reasoning and perspective and perception within how she sees the family and how she sees herself is skewed. Again this is a different move than "Sentimental Value" and "Predator: Badlands" (again very interesting choices). "Rosebush Pruning" is a movie about self-involved people that don't quite know who their true selves are save for one (and it not the one you think). The beauty is broken by an inner ugliness which is sort of the point of the whole thing. Ed wants to encapsulate it that they are all searching for their happiness but in reality, what they are trying to do is bury it and escape...or else be consumed by the nightmare. It is a cautionary tale wrapped in a twisted fable yet undeniably aware of the unlikability of its participants (like "The Substance" which MUBI also distributed). But that is sort of the point of it. B
By Tim Wassberg
