Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, geometries of suspicion and allegories of power

CANNES – In The Phoenician Scheme, Wes Anderson continues to delve into narrative matter like a baroque miniaturist of the imagination, but this time he turns his gaze toward less eccentric and more opaquely unsettling territories.

The film, based on a story written by Anderson himself Roman Coppola, initially presents itself as a sophisticated, retro-flavored spy game, that soon reveals itself to be an allegory about the mechanisms of power and the cyclical nature of betrayal. The title itself suggests an archetypal dimension of conspiracy: not an event, but a recurring pattern in history.

Anderson, while maintaining his unmistakable signature, made of rigorous symmetry, tightly controlled color palettes, understated performances, and meticulous choreography, as well as his taste for ensemble casts, here entrusted mainly to Benicio del Toro (Zsa-Zsa Korda) with Mia Threapleton (Liesl), Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Bill Murray, and Tom Hanks, seems to break free from the auteurist cage many had locked him in. The Phoenician Scheme plays on suspicion, but also with the impossibility of distinguishing truth from staging, loyalty from manipulation. The characters move like pawns, fully aware of their role, trapped in a structure that evokes not so much a political thriller as a Greek tragedy, where guilt is inscribed even before the action begins.

Zsa-Zsa is a European arms and aviation magnate who has miraculously survived death in a plane crash six times. Now it’s time to try and reconnect with his daughter Liesl, who has in the meantime become a pipe-smoking novice nun, and has been named “sole heir” to her father’s fortune. Anderson explained that the idea had a family trigger: “I have a daughter, Roman has a daughter, Benicio has a daughter. The way he builds that relationship, in my view, entered the film for the first time because it probably came from something my wife told me. She’s Lebanese and her father was an engineer, a Lebanese businessman. Years ago, she went to a meeting, and when she came back she said: ‘He told me: I want you to be ready, in case I can’t manage my affairs, my relationships. I want you to know what happens if I can’t handle everything.’ And he opened a closet and began pulling out shoeboxes — just like the ones in the film — and describing these different projects, engineering plans in various parts of the world. And her reaction, in the end, was: ‘It’s madness.’ That’s where it all started. The character ended up having a lot to do with him, and the film is dedicated to him, because he was simply an unforgettable and extraordinary person.”

Wes Anderson delivers a deeply metacinematic film, where every shot becomes a frame of meaning, and every gesture, even the most mundane, may conceal a strategy or spell disaster. The narrative structure, deliberately elliptical and recursive, challenges the viewer to question their own perspective: the observer is always already observed, the interpreter is always already part of the game, or rather, the scheme. The film’s essential meaning does not lie in solving the enigma, but in perpetuating it: The Phoenician Scheme is not a story about spies, but about the need to invent one.

The score is by Alexandre Desplat, and the costumes were designes by Milena Canonero. “I have been working with Milena for 23 years. I first met her while we were working in Italy with Bill Murray. And Roman had known her for many years even before that. She’s one of the three greatest living costume designers, and for me, the best. If there’s one person who deserves to be treated properly, it’s Milena,” Anderson stated.