When the time came for Karim Aïnouz to direct his first English-language feature a few years ago, few would have bet on it being “Firebrand.” A historical drama based on the life of Henry VIII survivor Catherine Parr, it was handsome, well-acted and directed with complete proficiency by the Brazilian arthouse sensualist, but so far from his usual taste for saturated melodrama and eroticism, you’d think he’d been assigned the gig by lottery. After a brief trip home for the hyper-carnal thriller “Motel Destino,” Aïnouz returns to Europe with “Rosebush Pruning,” which on the face of it looks a snugger fit for his sensibilities: a sweating, absurdist family saga of outsize gestures and out-of-bounds desires, rendered in hues so hot and drenched, you half-expect a “wet paint” sign on the screen.
The more — and more outrageously — it unfolds, however, the less “Rosebush Pruning” feels like it’s in Aïnouz’s wheelhouse. Or, indeed, anyone else’s, given its alluring but thoroughly peculiar jumble of comic, dramatic and generally antic tones, or the increasingly indeterminate target of its hollow social satire. Even the film’s creative DNA is all over the shop: Screenwriter Efthimis Filippou, a regular collaborator of Yorgos Lanthimos, was loosely inspired by Marco Bellocchio’s 1965 debut feature “Fists in the Pocket,” but where you can see that stark, startling anti-bourgeois fable playing out in the deadpan language of the Greek weird wave, Aïnouz’s ripe maximalist touch makes for a different animal entirely, even before you factor in the high-low contrasts of its all-star cast.
All these clashing elements and impulses, not to mention some droolworthy design contributions, land the film somewhere in the region of a Europudding “Saltburn” — not an unenjoyable proposition, but not a substantial one, and likely to be every bit as divisive with audiences as that sounds. For leading man Callum Turner, it’s a commendably strange, kinky vehicle to drive directly into a storm of James Bond casting rumors. Not that “Rosebush Pruning” turns out to be business as usual for any of his collaborators — including his gifted director, drifting ever farther from the warm romanticism of “Futuro Beach” or “Invisible Life.”
The odd, misleadingly prim title stems from a clumsy proverb made up by Edward (Turner), the neglected, semi-literate middle son of an exceedingly wealthy American family that relocated some years ago to the verdant northeastern coast of Spain. “People are roses, families are rosebushes,” he says in his surly running voiceover. “Rosebushes need pruning.”
As for who he thinks his family could shed, take your pick from its variously louche, dysfunctional fashion-plate members, headed by Tracy Letts’ blind, unfiltered patriarch, usually clad in a scarlet satin bathrobe. Edward’s younger brother Robert (Lukas Gage) spends his days doing little but pining most inappropriately for the attentions of eldest sibling Jack (Jamie Bell), while the stunted, oversexed energy of lone sister Anna (Riley Keough) spits in all directions.
When we’re told that the children’s mother (Pamela Anderson, surprisingly cast in a small role that more obviously calls for Christine Baranski-style hauteur) died two years ago, we’re inclined to think she’s better off out of it — though perhaps less so on hearing that she was torn apart by wolves in the local Catalonian woods. There’s an air of perverse adult fairytale to this setup, underlined by the lack of explanation as to why four adult siblings in their thirties haven’t managed to break out of the modernist family palace: Extreme wealth, it seems, makes comfortably numb prisoners of those born into it.
But Jack, the most sensible and straitlaced of the lot, may finally be making his escape, thanks to the normalizing influence of his merely quite privileged girlfriend Martha (Elle Fanning). As Jack and Martha look into finding a home of their own, the terse, stolidly watchful Edward — an oddly opaque character to carry the film’s point of view, played with aloof melancholy by Turner — is tacitly envious, having recently made his own fleeting connection with a citizen of the real world. Anna and Robert, however, despair over the imminent disruption of the family unit, and drastic, escalatingly calamitous steps are taken toward maintaining the status quo.
The fallout brings nasty surprises and broken taboos aplenty, though Filippou’s script actually shocks most effectively when dramatizing more everyday acts of cruelty and elitism. In the film’s most effectively discomfiting scene, when Martha meets the family for a strained lunch, she is ruthlessly sized up and dressed down by Anna for the visible price gap between her self-bought Zara dress and her gifted Bottega handbag. (And that’s before Dad, with calm entitlement, asks Anna to describe their guest’s cleavage.)
That Martha emerges as the most sympathetic figure here is saying something, considering her own spoilt retort to Jack’s hesitancy when they view a multimillion-dollar oceanside mansion: “I refuse to keep begging for the simple things.” “Rosebush Pruning” makes its anti-capitalist points tartly enough in such moments, but the twistier things get, the sillier they get too — while any social commentary begins to feel like a thin cover for so much luridly gross, glossy spectacle.
Still, there’s pleasure in the film’s excesses, mainly because Aïnouz and his team present them with such febrile, iridescent beauty. DP Hélène Louvart drowns frame after frame in sticky candy-apple reds, angelica greens and eye-searing ultramarines, the brightness turned way, way up — not that the rolling Spanish landscapes and Rodrigo Martirena’s magazine-dream production design demand the extra help. There’s nary a crease to be seen in Bina Daigeler’s costumes, all covetable, unapproachable and tailored to the gods; Matthew Herbert’s score may be among the lushest ever slathered over such horrible goings-on. Does it all need to be this lustrous? Does “Rosebush Pruning” lose some perspective in all this dazzle? Perhaps. But if you’re going to eat the rich, the film reasons, they may as well be delicious.