Berlinale: Rosebush Pruning & Dao reviews by David Katz

Like Pasolini’s Teorema, another key Italian film of the 60’s, the basic outline and themes of Marco Bellocchio’s explosive debut Fists in the Pocket are ripe for reworking. The bleak tale of a young, mentally disturbed young man committed to murdering his bourgeois family, Bellocchio was inspired by his main intellectual commitments of Marxism, Catholicism and Freudianism, yet moving the story half a century ahead to the present day, as Karim Aïnouz’s Rosebush Pruning does, allows new resonances to emerge.

Written by Efthimis Filippou (Yorgos Lanthimos’s key collaborator on his earlier, more confrontational movies), the central family are not so much bourgeois, as representing the hyper-rich American 1%, with the widowed patriarch (Tracy Letts) presiding over four millennial-aged children, Ed (Callum Turner), Jack (Jamie Bell), Anna (Riley Keough) and Robert (Lukas Gage), all living at home at the film’s beginning, and stuck in similar stages of arrested development. Intriguingly for fans of the original, its plot points and character traits are redistributed along the ensemble rather than mimicked, allowing the two films to be in authentic dialogue, rather than one overshadowing the other.

Still, the mysterious and deeply troubled Ed most resembles Lou Castel’s Alessandro, especially in his brutishly-handsome features and shuffling body language. A confident visual stylist and connoisseur of colour, Aïnouz amps up the aesthetic splendour of their palatial yet modernist mountainside home in Catalonia, evoking the lustre in which they soak their lives, and also its hermeticism, secure from the more quotidian daily struggles of everyone else. Whilst a familiar target from the likes of Triangle of Sadness and Succession, this depiction gains a more bite from showing how they covet and acquire good taste, rather than succumbing to kitsch, with the dialogue’s couture and sculpture references coming across like chimeric desires, never to be fulfilled.

But to the film’s detriment, Aïnouz and Filippou outfit every character with their own perverse sexual fetish, and whilst there’s interest seeing how each coheres to the plot and main themes, they also feel self-conscious, like they’re an obligation for this kind of story, rather than an organic choice. Whilst undoubtedly made for cinemas, I also could’t suppress its market and production status from my thoughts, as a film by MUBI; it’s obvious how attractive it would seem in their advertising campaigns, and on their streaming homepage, as a piece of casual, titillating home viewing that might only be watched in chunks or not completed at all.

______________________________________

For all I enjoyed in its scabrous provocation, a film like Rosebush Pruning could only exist in the logic of today’s arthouse market: you can feel how considerations of audience demographics and social media publicity are as key to it being greenlit as its content. Dao, a likely prizewinner in competition here, is a very welcome contrast to this, with its director Alain Gomis’ experimental, yet immersive, approach yielding a great evocation of West African diasporic life, and its cycle of repetitions.

Named for a philosophical concept relating to the cyclical nature of existence, Gomis’s film exists in alternating dual timelines, with a smaller third element boldly showing the production’s behind-the-scenes prep footage - a glimpse into the necessary contrivance it must build. Gloria (Katy Correa) is returning to her ancestral home of Guinea-Bissau in tandem with her daughter Nour (D’Johé Kouadio), for a “commemoration ceremony” of her father, the first in his generation that emigrated to Europe. Very different seemingly to the funeral taking place earlier, we glimpse the particular rituals, enacted and filmed with great care, that allow his death to be finally sanctified, and his descendants to bid him farewell. With a bit of disorientation for the viewer, Gloria and Nour actually are pushed to the sidelines in many sequences, as we see the panoply of family members who have gathered, and all their different investments and regrets concerning the family’s legacy.

At a later date, whilst shown simultaneously in the film’s editing, Nour is getting married in Paris, with a party taking place in a country chateau, and a similar amount of guests joining for the festivities, although with more ethnic and racial diversity. With six editors and three directors of photography credited, a “real time” impression emerges, every piece of assemblage betraying the cultural specificities that Gomis is so determined to capture.

Although it can be awkward to make comparisons, with the white Western gaze mediating how many African films are distributed, whether they’re newly premiered or revivals, Dao has an affinity with Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology, especially the episode Lover’s Rock, which captured a “blues party” from night till dawn. Indeed, when it premiered, the director Claire Denis awkwardly proposed directing a French remake herself, even if she accurately noted the commonalities between Franco-African and British-West Indies life. But like Lover’s Rock, Gomis realises that to depict something authentically in fiction, it needs to be recreated like it were actually happening, so the participants can forget they’re “acting”. And from that realistic base, poetic expression emerges. 

Dao Berlin Film Festival 2026