"This garish cavalcade of perversions, which just premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, should have been shocking and transgressive; the pieces are certainly there. It puts an attractive cast - including Callum Turner, Riley Keough, Jamie Bell, and Elle Fanning - through a psychosexual wringer filled with incest and murder and betrayal and assorted bodily fluids. But it somehow makes its madness boring."
"Our protagonist and narrator, Edward (Turner), sometimes dreams of fleeing to Greece to spend time with an older doctor he met at a medical convention, but most of the time he dreams of fancy shoes and handbags. He tells us early on that he likes to make up mock-profound sayings that appear to reveal great truths but are essentially meaningless. "A banana falls down, no matter. A melon falls down, it's over." "People are roses. Families are rosebushes. Rose"
Rosebush Pruning aims for transgressive shock yet renders its provocative elements dull. The story centers on a dysfunctional American family living in a Spanish mansion funded by their deceased mother's inheritance. The blind, judgmental father is cared for by children including Jack, Robert, and Anna, with incestuous desire, scheming, betrayal, and murder contaminating familial bonds. Edward, the protagonist-narrator, alternates fantasies of an older doctor in Greece with obsessions for luxury shoes and handbags and invents mock-profound sayings that mask emptiness. A notable ensemble cast fails to turn shock value into compelling drama.
Read at Vulture
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]