Brazilian director Karim Ainouz’s surreal satire “Rosebush Pruning” premiered on Saturday on the Berlin Film Festival with one of many program’s starriest casts portraying an outrageously spoiled and dysfunctional household descending into chaos.
Pamela Anderson, Callum Turner, Jamie Bell, Riley Keough and Elle Fanning are among the many actors telling the story of an American household mired in apparently countless quantities of inherited wealth and turning on one another of their lavish villa within the Spanish countryside.
Ed, one of many sons of the household — performed by Turner — serves as a narrator of kinds and sums up the remainder of his household as “lazy, mediocre, vapid egotists”.
Award-winning playwright and actor Tracy Letts, who performs the blind, abusive patriarch of the household, mentioned that “one of the things that this movie gets at… is that this extreme disparity in wealth breeds bad behavior”.
If the movie has a political message, it’s that such a state of affairs “probably creates fascism”, Letts informed a press convention.
In the vein of the HBO TV collection “The White Lotus” and “Succession”, in addition to movies resembling “Triangle of Sadness”, “Rosebush Pruning” delights in exposing the empty coldness beneath the luxurious designer materials sported by the ultra-rich.
The movie is impressed by the 1965 Italian movie “Fists in the Pocket”, by Marco Bellocchio, additionally about escalating dysfunction and violence inside a rich household.
Ainouz mentioned that that movie felt to him just like the “Grimm Brothers on acid”, a imaginative and prescient which could be very a lot current in “Rosebush Pruning”, full with incestuous overtones and a vivid coloration palette for the idyllic, sun-drenched backdrop.
Bell spoke of the “operatic absurdity” that unfolds within the movie, which sees the siblings’ relationships take ever weirder and violent turns.
Anderson performs the youngsters’s mom, whose presence intrudes into the household’s lives regardless of her apparently having been killed by wolves.
At the press convention, Ainouz additionally addressed the significance of public funding for movie, “in a time where censorship and political judgments of what we’re doing are really, really dangerous, particularly in certain countries”.
The director mentioned that in his native Brazil, “cinema would not exist if it were not for public funding”.
Turner was requested on the press convention about rumors he could be the subsequent actor to tackle the position of James Bond within the iconic spy franchise.
He mentioned it was “very early for that question” and supplied no additional remark, prompting Letts, 60, to lift fun by quipping: “I’m the next James Bond.”
© 2026 AFP