“Rosebush Pruning”, interview with director Karim Aïnouz

From a master of Italian cinema, Marco Bellocchio and his 1965 directorial debut, “I pugni in tasca”, comes “Rosebush Pruning”, the new film by Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz, who—after “Firebrand” —returns to directing an English-language feature with an all-star cast including Callum Turner, Riley Keough, Jamie Bell, Lukas Gage, Elena Anaya, Tracy Letts, Elle Fanning, and Pamela Anderson.

Presented in competition at the 76th Berlinale, the film is an outrageous contemporary satire about the absurdity of the traditional patriarchal family.

I pugni in tasca – Fists in the pocket

“Rosebush Pruning” brings together Karim Aïnouz’s feverish imagination and a classic of Italian cinema, Marco Bellocchio’s “Fists in the Pocket”. More than a simple remake, the film is a radical rewrite that shifts the center of conflict: no longer the mother as the family’s pathological fulcrum, but the father—an embodiment of blind yet pervasive power, and a mirror of a patriarchal society that perpetuates itself

Karim Aïnouz reveals the reason he loved Marco Bellocchio’s debut feature and the ways his “Rosebush Pruning” is connected to the 1965’s film : “I think it was the energy—the madness of it, really. Fists in the Pocket was made a year before I was born, and when I watched it again, years after the first time, I was struck by how modern it still feels. There’s something in it that makes you think: How did he do this? And maybe he didn’t even fully know what he was doing, because it was his first film. It feels incredibly intuitive, exciting, and inventive. of course, it’s not the same film and it’s not about the same themes. Bellocchio’s film isn’t about privilege; it’s about loss, mental illness, and other things. But what interested me was the blueprint—the structure. We took that blueprint and shifted the center: we removed the mother from that position and put the father there instead. So yes, it’s the same underlying framework, and it comes from my love for Bellocchio”.

The creation of fascism

If in the 1965 film the urgency was to break away from the provinces and their conventions, here the challenge is to expose the moral emptiness that lies beneath privilege.

The polished image of the family serves as the perfect counterpoint to its emptiness and to the inability of its members to form genuine bonds.

Karim Aïnouz develops the idea—already expressed during the film’s press conference—that the analysis of this family, the microcosm it represents, serves as a perfect example of the dynamics that gave rise, and still give rise today, to fascist-minded attitudes.

Plot