The Phoenician Scheme review – an absolute gas

Allow me to pro­pose a the­o­ry: The Phoeni­cian Scheme is the third part of what we shall loose­ly and unof­fi­cial­ly refer to as Wes Anderson’s ​‘Life of a Film­mak­er Tril­o­gy’. 2021’s The French Dis­patch was his unabashed ode to the mav­er­ick Amer­i­can journos and cul­ture writ­ers of the ​’50s and ​’60s, yet when tak­en in the longview it is also a film about that is fas­ci­nat­ed with the writ­ing process itself, par­tic­u­lar­ly how the human mind sculpts real­i­ty with the use of lit­er­ary and doc­u­men­tary tools. The film is about find­ing enter­tain­ment in the appar­ent­ly mun­dane, and Ander­son him­self could stand in for any of the scribes on show. Then in 2023 we got the meta-cin­e­mat­ic jew­el, Aster­oid City, a film that’s about direct­ing, but more specif­i­cal­ly, the process of drama­tis­ing, as in, how we trans­pose these fan­tas­tic texts into the visu­al medium.

The Phoeni­cian Scheme, then, shifts its focus a lit­tle ways away from the con­ven­tion­al artistry of writ­ing and direct­ing, and here we have a sto­ry about pro­duc­ing, and the peo­ple whose role it is on a film set to bring a plan togeth­er. It’s ques­tion­able whether Ander­son sees this tril­o­gy as being specif­i­cal­ly reflec­tive of his own per­son­al meth­ods, but these three films when tak­en in con­cert com­prise a top-to-tail dis­ser­ta­tion on the joys and the trau­mas of mak­ing movies. This project is in many ways his cin­e­mat­ic rejoin­der to Ben­jamin Britten’s ​‘The Young Person’s Guide to the Orches­tra,’ a clas­si­cal com­po­si­tion he employed so beau­ti­ful­ly in Moon­rise King­dom.

In this instance, there’s a sense that Ander­son feels that mak­ing a film is less an act of skill or knowhow more than it is an act of diplo­ma­cy and mak­ing sure you have the right peo­ple just on side enough to make the whole thing hap­pen. Beni­cio del Toro is intro­duced as a melan­choly arms deal­er named Zsa-zsa Kor­da, father to a small pha­lanx of inquis­i­tive young sons (whom he forces to live in a house across the street from his own cas­tle-like man­sion), and one daugh­ter, a can­tan­ker­ous and semi-estranged pipe-smok­ing nun named Sis­ter Leisl (Mia Threaple­ton). Due to his var­i­ous desta­bil­is­ing antics in the region, he has become the tar­get of mul­ti­ple (failed) assas­si­na­tion attempts, but like a cat who just burned through its eighth life, a moment of exis­ten­tial reflec­tion is now forced upon him.

Del Toro plays Zsa-zsa as a fear­less rogue who refus­es to dwell on a check­ered past. He sees no irony or good luck in his abil­i­ty to sur­vive, and deals with all aspects of life in a tone of high, almost grandiose seri­ous­ness. When he’s fly­ing his pri­vate jet and the hull starts to wob­ble, from tur­bu­lence per­haps or an incom­ing mis­sile, he will glance up from his lat­est doorstop read­ing mate­r­i­al (usu­al­ly a dry ento­mo­log­i­cal text­book), and assure his fel­low pas­sen­gers of his total lack of wor­ry. As with a film pro­duc­er, you reach a point in your career where you can’t allow your­self to be scared of such triv­i­al­i­ties as per­son­al antag­o­nism, finan­cial stress, phys­i­cal injury or death from above, and that’s Zsa-zsa to a tee.