Zoe Whitfield
(CNN) — So intimately tethered is the American family at the center of Karim Aïnouz’s latest movie “Rosebush Pruning” – by blood, desire, and an excessive interest in designer labels – that the arrival of any outsider would guarantee friction. When Elle Fanning’s character Martha (the girlfriend of eldest son Jack, portrayed by Jamie Bell), is introduced for the first time, his sister Anna (Riley Keough) quickly dismisses the perceived intruder in the most damning way she knows how: venomously characterizing Martha’s perfectly chic black and red floral dress as high street garb.
“It’s obviously not Zara,” costume designer Bina Daigeler, who sourced the dress from a vintage store in Barcelona, clarified on a video call. “You can’t see who made it, which made it easier for Anna to say, ‘oh, it’s probably a Zara dress.’” The conclusion to one of the film’s more explicitly uncomfortable scenes, Anna’s remark follows a request by her widowed father (Tracy Letts), blind since the matriarch’s passing, to describe their guest’s appearance: dress, handbag, hair, bosom. Anna’s attitude speaks to the jealousy that fuels the movie’s wider narrative – Jack is adored, largely inappropriately, by all the members of his family – while his father’s probing highlights a warped sense of entitlement.
The four siblings – Anna, Jack, middle brother Ed (Callum Turner) and younger brother Robert (Lukas Gage) – are all adult and all still living at the family home, a modernist property in the hinterlands of Catalonia, Spain. By their own account they’re all overly enthusiastic about fashion, with access to the kind of wealth that allows them to focus solely on the pursuit of clothes and style, and this pre-occupation is tightly woven into the film’s dialogue. Indeed, the movie opens with Ed quizzing an older Greek man he’s befriended on the Belgian designer Ann Demeulemeester, before berating him for confusing his Bottega Veneta loafers for Sebago.
Loosely based on the 1965 Marco Bellocchio film, “Fists in the Pocket,” “Rosebush Pruning” is Aïnouz’s second English language film and was co-written by Efthimis Filippou. With its unconventional family dynamic, it adopts a similar energy to Yorgos Lanthimos’s absurd family drama “Dogtooth,” (also co-written by Filippou), while its eat the rich style of satire puts it in conversation with Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn.” Aïnouz’s new feature, however, is extreme in its brand of dysfunction and study of incestuous lust, amped up by its arresting cinematography. Here it is Ed, whose early voiceovers announce the lay of land, that ultimately devises a violent plan to disrupt the family’s co-dependency, allowing Jack, an anomaly amongst the “lazy, mediocre, vapid, egotists,” a chance to live independently with his girlfriend.
“It was very intuitive, between me and Karim, we had fun together immediately,” said Daigeler, who was Oscar-nominated for her work on 2020’s “Mulan” and led the costume department on the acclaimed Cate Blanchett vehicle “Tár.” “We’d meet early in the house before anybody else and exchange ideas. He mentioned the Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla a lot, and I love Sorolla. He’s often on my moodboards. We were in Barcelona, near the sea, in the mountains with the family – all these emotions are somehow reflected in Sorolla’s paintings.”
The fittings, she added, “were like a dress up party, and I think that suited the movie because it’s a family absolutely crazy about fashion. We are talking about a very deconstructed family, so I wanted to merge that into the costum