THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME is yet another blast from the canon of Wes Anderson, his latest film bearing the same cheeky originality his previous pictures have proven, baring the familiar stigmata of cinematic genius.
This extraordinary opus opens on a plane carrying Anatole “Zsa-zsa” Korda, enigmatic industrialist, one of the richest men in Europe. Korda’s wide-ranging, wildly complex, and ruthless business practices have made him an enemy to not just rival enterprises but also governments of every ideology across the globe and a target for free lance and state sanctioned assassins.
In the first moments of the movie, his aircraft is targeted, blown out of the skies, and he again, now for the sixth time, miraculously, survives.
It is 1950 and he is in the final stages of a decades-long, career-defining project (Korda Land and Sea Phoenician Infrastructure Scheme), the expansive exploitation of a potentially-rich, long-dormant region. The risk to his personal capital has become incalculable. The threats to his life are ongoing. He chooses this moment to appoint and prepare a successor: his twenty-year-old estranged daughter Liesl, currently a nun.
With personal tutor and incessant insect inspector Bjorn in tow, Zsa-zsa and Liesl sweep across Modern Greater Independent Phoenicia meeting their assorted partners on a mission to close The Gap (a rapidly expanding financial shortfall) which Zsa-zsa quantifies as: “Everything we got – plus a little bit more.” Along the way, Liesl investigates the unsolved murder, a decade earlier, of Zsa-zsa’s first wife, her mother.
Marvel at the inscrutable, compelling, worldly, and completely singular world Wes Anderson has cooked up this time. Exhilarating and hilarious, a work of pure pleasure and distinct detailed design.
Starring Benicio del Toro as the mesmerising Zsa-zsa, Mia Threapleton as his knowing nun daughter, and Michael Cera as the enigmaticatic entomologist, Bjorn, THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME features another hallmark of Wes Anderson film making, an amazing ensemble cast also features Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Mathieu Amalric, Jeffrey Wright, and Scarlett Johansson; plus Richard Ayoade as a helpful freedom fighter, Benedict Cumberbatch as Zsa-zsa’s mysterious half-brother, all brow and beard, Nubar, Rupert Friend as the shadowy agent “Excalibur”, and Hope Davis as Liesl’s steely Mother Superior, as well as Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsborough and F. Murray Abraham as heavenly figures and Bill Murray as God.
Oscar winners and nominees litter the film. The delirious design is by Adam Stockhausen, costumes by Milena Canonero and music score by Alexandre Desplat, the trio who all won an Oscar for Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Enthralling, immersive, funny, endearing, eye catching, imaginative, THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME is a thing of beauty and a joy forever.
