The Phoenician Scheme

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

Director Wes Anderson

Anderson on the set

Anderson with Mathieu Amalric,Mia Threapleton, and Benicio Del Toro

Kate Winslet with her daughter Mia Threapleton

Benicio Del Toro with Mia Threapleton and Scarlett Johansson

THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME             B                                                                               USA  Germany  (101 mi)  2025  d: Wes Anderson

Wes Anderson is a descendant of the Marx brothers and Jacques Tati, humorists enthralled with the idea of creating their own cinematic universe, and while Anderson’s quirky dollhouse world may not be for everyone, with production designer Adam Stockhausen on full display, this esoteric espionage caper is among the harder to follow storylines of all his films, but that hardly matters as this just barrels along at a scintillating pace, with an evocative score by Alexandre Desplat, where one thing that is unmistakable is just how bat-shit crazy it is, told with a deadpan, screwball comedy relish, taking us places no one else in the world is willing to go, where this unique mindset and miniature visual aesthetic are certainly his own, as the attention to detail is stunning.  With all the throwaway gags, witty asides, and the historical and cinematic references, it’s nearly impossible to follow it all onscreen (an entire exhibition is dedicated to Anderson’s career at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, Enter the world of Wes Anderson at the Cinémathèque ..., while an exhibit at London’s Design Museum is planned in the fall, Wes Anderson: The Archives), as it’s gone in the blink of an eye, like the product placement of L.S./M.F.T. during a blood transfusion, a notorious advertisement for cigarettes, Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco, Lucky Strike Commercial #1 (1948) YouTube (1:01), a seemingly insignificant detail that only speaks to those old enough and crazy enough to remember that advertisement jingle.  While a darkness has crept into his later films, often reflecting contemporary authoritarian trends, the director is way ahead of his times in that regard, as evidenced by The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), which allegorized a creeping fascism, or 2018 Top Ten List #7 Isle of Dogs, where a corrupt authoritarian mayor has banned all dogs to an abandoned island, mirroring the current practice of Trump sending so-called dangerous immigrants to languish in overseas prisons.  Anderson’s framing and composition are, as always, exquisite, producing stills that are literally designed to look good enough to hang in an art gallery, where the end credits are among the more uniquely designed in recent memory, showing images of famous paintings that inspired the look of the film, all set to the music of Stravinsky’s Firebird, Stravinsky: Finale - Suite from The Firebird / Los Angeles ... YouTube (3:00), suggesting they have a profoundly liberating influence, while also including an amusing statement that this may not be used for the purposes of training AI.  Perhaps the biggest surprise is the casting of Kate Winslet’s daughter, Mia Threapleton, as a novitiate nun, who surprisingly holds her own against a cast of stars, most only appearing briefly, yet the A-list of names in the ensemble cast is impressive, suggesting there’s no shortage of people who want to work with Anderson, who is one of the defining visionaries of our generation, whose influence is felt far and wide.  Threapleton watched the animated feature FANTASTIC MR. FOX (2009) when she was about eight or nine-years old, then was blown away by 2012 Top Ten Films of the Year: #3 Moonrise Kingdom, deciding then and there that she wanted to work with Anderson one day, sending him a self-made audition tape for this film, recreating a scene from ISLE OF DOGS (2018), which the director loved, choosing her immediately after reading with leading protagonist Benicio Del Toro, who felt a connection working with her.  While people have different reactions to the idiosyncratic Wes Anderson experience, as all the characters are essentially cartoons, yet this film would just not be the same without her, providing the heart and soul that the other characters lack, inspired by Anderson’s relationship with his own daughter, making this a very personal film for him.  The film is dedicated to Anderson’s late father-in-law, Fuad Malouf, a Lebanese engineer and businessman who had a vast array of ongoing international projects in the works.  

Anderson has a multi-billionaire benefactor/business partner in Steven Rales, whose Indian Paintbrush (company) has almost exclusively produced every Anderson movie since 2007, with just a handful of other movies thrown in.  As for the film itself, it’s a wild and wacky affair, shot on 35mm in the Babelsberg Studio in Germany (the same studio where Fritz Lang shot METROPOLIS in 1927) by Bruno Delbonnel, responsible for the cutesy style of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s AMÉLIE (2001), Julie Taymor’s psychedelic Beatles fantasia ACROSS THE UNIVERSE (2007), and the magnificent look of Joel Coen’s 2022 Top Ten List #5 The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021), where this is the first live-action film not shot by Anderson’s regular cinematographer Robert Yeoman.  Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival, with a script co-written by Anderson and Roman Coppola, this film delves into the nefarious world of trade and commerce, which includes sabotage, a hidden espionage ring, and multiple assassination attempts, as personified by industrialist and arms dealer Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda (Benicio Del Toro), a ruthless opportunist and the richest man in Europe who also dabbles in the defense and aviation industry, loosely based on Armenian oil magnate Calouste Gulbenkian, who helped Western companies exploit the oil-producing regions of the Middle East while amassing a huge fortune and art collection of more than 6000 works of art, which he kept in a private museum at his Paris house (now housed in a museum in Lisbon), described by an art expert in a 1950 article from Life magazine, Mystery billionaire, "Never in modern history has one man owned so much."  This unscrupulous element of wielding power in order to make as much money as possible is a stark contrast to the art-inspired visual feast that commands the screen, showing a darker side of the American artist, perhaps reflected by that same turn of events in American politics, as it’s difficult to say whether Anderson really wanted to offer thoughts on global capitalism, but the connection to a contemporary reality, and some well-known billionaires, is all too evident.  Set in 1950, we first meet Zsa-Zsa flying in his private plane somewhere over the Balkans when he hears a strange sound, like a loud thump, quickly turning around, only to see a bomb blast completely eviscerate a fuselage side panel, taking his personal secretary with it, but he miraculously survives a crash landing.  This near death experience, apparently his sixth or seventh assassination attempt, plunges him headlong into a vision of the afterlife, shifting to black and white imagery, where he literally sits in judgment of his life from beyond the grave, confronted with his own mortality, where God is played by Bill Murray, a large bearded figure in white robes, surrounded by otherworldly beings.  Because of the shadowy forces repeatedly targeting him with assassination attempts, while also trying to undermine his business ventures, he summons his long-abandoned and pious daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton), who he hasn’t seen in years, to discuss making her the sole heir to his fortune, having mysteriously disinherited all his many sons, The Phoenician Scheme Movie Clip - Sole Heir (2025) YouTube (42 seconds).  This brief, yet highly effective scene taking place in his palazzo-inspired residence full of fine art establishes the particulars, “Never buy good pictures.  Buy masterpieces,” setting the framework for the rest of the film, becoming a battle of wills, like a morality play, where despite all the absurd encounters and theatrical shenanigans turning into an action-packed, globe-trotting romp, it’s all essentially a cover for a story about a father trying, in his own bizarre way, to connect with the daughter he barely knows, embracing themes like tragedy, redemption, honor, and yes, happiness.

Zsa-Zsa has a habit of carrying around a satchel of hand grenades, which he hands out to business partners like souvenirs during their encounters, where he typically starts out with the familiar refrain, “Help yourself to a hand grenade,” which people are more than happy to accept.  His titular “scheme” is to develop multiple infrastructure projects across “Modern Greater Independent Phoenicia,” a fictional land populated by princes, spies, revolutionaries, and large investors, and a mammoth Korda Land and Sea Phoenician Infrastructure Scheme involving a canal, a massive tunnel, a railroad line, and a hydroelectric dam.  His wheeler-dealer style has created many enemies, known disparagingly as “Mr. Five Per Cent” for his ability to always take a cut, hated the world over as he thinks everyone can be bought, having no friends and an unloving family he has largely ignored, but the business world hates him for exploiting local workers as slave labor, for his rampant lies and deceit, accountable to no laws whatsoever, and for dubiously cutting corners to become ridiculously successful.  Liesl has lived in a convent ever since her mother died when she was young, still stinging from the belief that Zsa-Zsa may have had something to do with her demise, as all his ex-wives died under suspicious circumstances, yet he steadfastly denies any involvement.  While he’s obviously a galvanizing figure, her insistence at discovering who was behind her mother’s murder leads her to accept this vaguely conceived succession agreement, on a trial basis, of course, bringing these seeming opposites together.  Zsa-Zsa’s grand scheme is outlined in a series of labeled shoeboxes, each containing a core component to the project, but rising production costs means he needs to close a gap in the plan’s financing, requiring visits to various key players to cover the artificially inflated costs, as his enemies have skyrocketed building material prices for his construction projects.  Liesl agrees to join Zsa-Zsa on his journey, accompanied by his special assistant, the family’s Norwegian tutor and entomologist, Bjørn (Michael Cera), who utters the unthinkable, “I speak my heart, I’m a Bohemian,” returning to the skies once again, with Zsa-Zsa repeatedly offering the reassuring words, “Myself, I feel very safe.”  Liesl is stunned to discover he’s been spying on her, though Zsa-Zsa is quick to retort, “It’s not called spying when you’re the parent.  It’s called nurturing.”  Where it all leads is to pure chaos and pandemonium, with a flurry of scenes strewn together, each more strangely disconcerting than the next, THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME - "Human Rights" Official Clip YouTube (1:10), THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME - "Oh Dear" Official Clip YouTube (42 seconds), THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME - "You Used to Work for Me ... YouTube (44 seconds), meeting with fez-wearing, French nightclub owner Marseille Bob (Mathieu Amalric), a reference to Jacques Becker’s TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI (1954), interrupted by a group of armed revolutionaries, weirdly getting stuck in quicksand, while also visiting his second Cousin Hilda (Scarlett Johansson), who runs a “Utopian Outpost.”  But the ultimate showdown is with his big-bearded brother, Uncle Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch, looking like a Russian czar), “He’s not human, he’s biblical,” which is literally a blood feud made to resemble a battle between a Marvel superhero and a villain, set to the bombastic music of Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky, Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition (Orch. Ravel) : Promenade 1 YouTube (1:44), turning into a day of reckoning.  What follows is not what anyone would expect, with a beautifully charming Buñuelian twist at the end that does not disappoint, feeling strangely humanizing all of a sudden, saturated with dry wit and humor, yet the incessant business jargon used throughout seems intentionally designed to leave viewers emotionally disconnected through an obsessive ironic detachment, as none of it really makes any sense, nonetheless this is a welcome addition to the Wes Anderson universe, filled with pastel appeal and memorable charm, where what really stands out is that the actors truly shine, displaying impeccable comic timing in this elaborately constructed geometrical puzzle box.      

2015 Top Ten Films #7 My Golden Days (Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse)

MY GOLDEN DAYS (Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse)                  A-            
France  (120 mi)  2015  ‘Scope  d:  Arnaud Desplechin 

While not exactly a prequel, but a reimagining of an original story used in an earlier film, MY SEX LIFE…OR HOW I GOT INTO AN ARGUMENT (1996), which was a sprawling three-hour French relationship talkathon, while in this film Desplechin has resurrected the central character of Paul Dédalus, played nineteen years apart in both films by Mathieu Amalric, who opens the film as a present day character remembering events occurring in the late 80’s and early 90’s, where a more accurate French title translates to Three Remembrances of My Youth.  Winner of the SACD Prize (Best Screenplay) in the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes, the director (along with Julie Peyr) has written a memory play that explores the Proustian autobiographical memories of the Dédalus character from childhood through adolescence, told in three segments, where the first two, Childhood and Russia, preface a larger story entitled Esther that blends into the early periods of MY SEX LIFE, a film that falls within a great tradition of French coming-of age-films, having made some of the best, including Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), Téchiné’s Wild Reeds (Les Roseaux Sauvages) (1994), and Assayas’s Cold Water (L’eau Froide) (1994).  The brief opening sequences are actually the weakest in the entire film, as the viewer doesn’t have a handle yet on Paul Dédalus, or even a connection to the earlier film.  Instead he’s seen as a middle-aged man leaving his lover, returning to Paris for a government post in Foreign Affairs after spending a decade working as a scholar and anthropologist in Tajikistan.  It’s only at the airport where he’s stopped and questioned, interrogated by a French official, dutifully performed by Resnais regular André Dussollier, with questions about his passport, which shifts the film into a lengthy flashback sequence, often expressed through a round (iris) frame, a holdover technique from the Silent era, suggesting memories of long ago, recounting three seminal moments from his past.  Like Truffaut’s young ruffian alter-ego character Antoine Doinel, a petrified 11-year old Paul Dédalus (Antoine Bui) also ran away from his home in Roubaix escaping from his deranged mother, depicted in a panicked German Expressionist horror scene where he holds her off with a knife (shadows appearing on a staircase), warning her not to come any closer, before running away to his kindly great-aunt Rose, Françoise Lebrun, who played Veronika in The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) (1973), looking better than ever, observed by a curious young Paul as the affectionate recipient of a sweet lesbian kiss.  While he’s sad to learn of his mother’s suicide shortly thereafter (claiming he never loved her), it has a permanent effect on his emotionally depressed father (Olivier Rabourdin), whose mind is elsewhere and is unable to look after his children, where Paul along with his sister and younger brother share their formative teenage years raising themselves. 

However, this does not account for why there is another Paul Dédalus living in Australia with a registered passport using the same birthdate and birthplace.  For that, the scene shifts to Russia, where Paul takes an eventful student high school trip to Minsk in the USSR as an idealistic 16-year old, now played by Quentin Dolmaire, turning into an amateur spy thriller when he along with his Jewish friend Marc (Elyot Milshtein) agree to help the Refuseniks (Refuseniks - Jewish Virtual Library), sneaking away from a student tour of the National Arts Museum to help a group of Russian Jews denied permission to leave the country, providing secret packages filled with money, while Paul goes so far as to offer his passport, allowing someone else to assume his identity.  To cover for his own lost passport, he gives himself a black eye and claims he was mugged and his passport stolen.  Filled with plenty of Cold War tension, including bribing a suspicious police officer that stops them with a pack of American cigarettes, the young boys actually pull it off, blending into his teenage years where he’s with his sister Delphine (Lily Taieb) and brother Ivan (Raphaël Cohen) watching television footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which Paul finds sad as “I can see my childhood ending.”  But most of all he remembers Esther, played by Lou Roy-Lecollinet, an absolute delight as the girl of his dreams, the beauty of his eye, and his soulmate, something he realizes from the moment he sets eyes on her, as she’s “the one,” a dazzling beauty who is mature beyond her years, amusingly aware of the effect she has on men, and couldn’t care less what others think of her, an earlier version of the same character played by Emmanuelle Devos in MY SEX LIFE.  Inviting her to come to a party at their father’s house (believing he is away), Desplechin perfectly frames her entrance, shifting to slow motion with her initial appearance, where celestial music honors her as the Goddess of Love and Beauty.  The same device is used several times, each time more amusing than the next, as this is exactly how high school boys envision their first love.  They’re not just “in love,” but the moon and the stars orbit around her very presence.  Paul has a clever way of showing his interest, especially when she shows up with somebody else, which is to ignore her while she dances with all the other guys, staring ponderously at her throughout, waiting until the guy she came with decides to leave, expecting to take her home, but she insists upon staying, rudely telling him to scram.  Thus begins the long journey of a tumultuous decade-long love affair, but that night, all he does is walk her home, romantically walking through the city streets just before daybreak, awkwardly trying to make clever conversation, confessing whatever comes out of his mouth, which she finds amusing, ending the night with the cinematic perfection of a gentle kiss, conveying in our eyes exactly how he feels and just what she means to him. 

These two, Roy-Lecollinet and Dolmaire, both first time actors, literally light up the screen, where their ecstatic combustible energy is something to savor, as Esther is viewed as royalty, where every male in the vicinity is attracted to her, so she quickly learns to fend them off and has become a master in the art of the put-down, showing an instant disdain for people that get on her nerves, believing life is too short for people to waste her time, but she has the whole world beckoning her, wanting to be with her.  Initially Paul appears to have little chance, spending his time traveling back and forth between Roubaix and Paris, where it turns out absence makes the heart grow fonder.  In an era before social media, where now kids routinely send hundreds of text messages every day, the preferred technique back in the day was writing letters, pouring out one’s heart and soul in confessional outpourings of love (which are read directly into the camera), where every spare moment is dedicated to an idyllic “her,” keeping her foremost on his mind even as he pursues his Parisian studies and a life as an academic, where their exchanges are electric, literally flowing with excitement and energy when they meet, exhibiting all the signs of a sweetness of youth, becoming passionate lovers before long, where they can’t live without each other.  The beauty of this film is really the playfulness of Desplechin’s cinematic presentation, the way he mixes it up, showing plenty of offbeat humor, tenderness, moments of despair, crude awakenings, and a world where nothing makes sense except each other, but where their journey together is anything but smooth as she fights to maintain her fiery independence, often shown facing straight into the camera with a cigarette in her hand, where she’s literally posing for the audience, becoming a snapshot in time.  On again, off again, she’s put off by the extent of his absences, and freely acknowledges she sleeps with other guys, where they go through a series of breakups and reconciliations, but Paul has a way of charming the pants off her (which happens literally with another woman in the film), where she loves the way he’ll poetically describe a work of art, like one of his favorite paintings, putting her somewhere in the center of its majestic beauty, a sacred, unreachable perfection, while he sees himself as some lonely figure off to the side, but perhaps the only thing in the frame alert enough to notice the power of her staggering presence.  It’s a fascinating free-wheeling style that matches the furious pace of his earlier film, literally painting a window into their damaged souls where they have such a special chemistry together that is rare in films today.  With a throbbing soundtrack that matches the elevated emotional reach of the film, there’s something bewitching and enchanting about it, where Desplechin’s masterful direction breathes life into an age-old Romeo and Juliet love story, becoming intensely personal, fiercely sincere, especially a scene late in the film, with tinges of sadness when looked back upon because it never lasted, but the thoughtfulness and thorough detail of the remembrances are a brilliant ode to youth, as illuminating as they are intoxicating.