3 hours ago
6
Since Jesse Armstrong’s Succession and Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, wealthy, spoilt, dysfunctional siblings are the new rock’n’roll, and now here is a film from Greek screenwriter Efthimis Filippou (co-author of Yorgos Lanthimos’s Alps and Dogtooth) and directed by Karim Aïnouz. It is a weird-wave contrivance concerning a messed-up US plutocrat clan living in Spain, freely remade from Marco Bellocchio’s 1965 film Fists in the Pocket. Their bizarre and cartoony secrets, involving sex abuse, manipulation and self-harm, are satirically symptomatic of capitalism and the patriarchy, and how the rich, however entrepreneurial and smart, create a next-gen class of useless drones, on whose behalf all this wealth has supposedly been accumulated. I have to admit to finding it heavy-handed and clumsy more often than not, although there are some good performances, notably from Jamie Bell and Elle Fanning.
A strange extended family lives in a luxurious modernist house; the father (Tracy Letts) is a blind widower haunted by the memories of his late wife (Pamela Anderson) who was savaged by wolves in a nearby forest. His grownup children, infantilised by wealth, all live there: highly strung Robert (Lukas Gage) has epilepsy, and is entrusted with supervising his father’s horse riding; Anna (Riley Keough) is a talentless singer-songwriter; and Ed (Callum Turner) is a would-be fashionista. First among equals is Jack (Jamie Bell), who has the intimate honour of helping his father with his nightly teeth-cleaning; their mother’s teeth were always dazzlingly white.
Jack, however, infuriates the family by planning to move out of the compound and into an apartment with his girlfriend Martha (Fanning), who nettles the musically aspirational Anna by being a gifted classical guitarist. When Martha comes for a family lunch, the mischievous father asks Anna to describe Martha – to her intense discomfiture – and even asks about the size of her “bosom”.
Ed also learns to fabricate Jack’s voice so he can fake his presence in the bathroom for the paternal teeth-cleaning, and to make impostor phone calls to Robert to glean further secrets. Anna has a whimsical crush on the butcher who delivers the dead lamb that they place next to the cross on the exact spot where their mother is said to have died, to feed the wolves. And everyone starts following Jack on his periodic mysterious excursions out of the house, leading to the film’s one amusing revelation.
This is a movie with a certain amount of visual style and it does hang together, but it tries the patience with its assumption that there is something rather seductive, amusing and entertaining about all these people. In fact, the satire is pedantic and overworked, and its dramatic effects are unearned, generating a strange sensation of pointlessness.
