Karim Ainouz probes family dynamics with 'operatic absurdity' at Berlin festival

Brazilian director Karim Ainouz's new drama "Rosebush Pruning" delves into patriarchy and trauma within an insular wealthy family, approaching the material with what actor Jamie Bell on Saturday described as "operatic absurdity".

"Inhabiting characters that don't want for anything, nor have any ambition" was a tricky but interesting space, said Bell, who rose to fame in 2000 with "Billy Elliot".

"But it was really fun making this movie because there were no rules," he told journalists at the Berlin Film Festival ahead of the premiere.

ABSURDIST FILM PEDIGREE

Bell is Jack, the eldest of four siblings who live in a sprawling mansion in Spain with their blind father, played by Tracy Letts, two years after their mother (Pamela Anderson) has died.

His siblings include Callum Turner as Ed, who proudly refuses to read or write, as well as Robert, played by Lukas Gage and Anna (Riley Keough), who try to stop Jack from moving in with his girlfriend Martha (Elle Fanning).

Beyond its exploration of social and familial structures, Letts said the film's idle, privileged characters have political resonance.

"One of the things that this movie gets at, on the face of it, is that this extreme disparity in wealth breeds bad behaviour, and in fact, probably creates fascism," he said.

Anderson said the characters reflected one aspect of our times.

"There's so much of this youth that is wealthy, that comes of wealthy, this inherited kind of wealth and this superficiality," she told the news conference.

INSPIRATION FROM MARCO BELLOCCHIO

The screenplay is by Efthimis Filippou, a frequent collaborator of Greek absurdist filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, and inspired by Italian director Marco Bellocchio's 1965 debut "Fists in the Pocket".

A scathing critique of an Italian bourgeois, dsyfunctional family, its themes, which Ainouz summed up as revolution and change, were resonant then in the way "Rosebush Pruning" is now.

Ainouz, who has brought several films to Berlin, also aspires to take on another cinema icon.

When a reporter asked up-and-comer Turner whether he might be the next James Bond, Ainouz jumped in: "It's serious, one of my biggest dreams in life is to direct 007, so just for the record..."

-Reporting by Miranda Murray and Hanna Rantala; editing by Barbara Lewis/Reuters