Beyond the Dreams of Avarice
Festival de Cannes
MOVIE REVIEW
The Phoenician Scheme (2025)
“The Phoenician Scheme” is, for better or worse, an archetypal Wes Anderson movie. The Cannes Film Festival competition entry is, once again, a timeless motion storybook about affluent eccentrics that’s symmetrical, pastel and droll. While Mr. Anderson’s rigorous mise en scène is always to be admired, telling a tale like this in the techbro oligarchy era is a choice – sort of like the cinematic equivalent of let them eat cake.
Benicio del Toro stars as Anatole “Zsa-zsa” Korda, a callous, filthy-rich industrialist in 1950 universally loathed by bureaucrats, business partners and former employees alike. He survives his sixth plane crash in the opening scene, as he constantly faces assassination attempts. All three of his ex-wives are dead, spurring rampant gossip. He has nine boys and one girl, some biological and some adopted just in case they turn out better.
Zsa-zsa summons his estranged daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton) to announce his intention to cut off all of his boys and make her the sole heir to his fortune. But she’s heard rumors that he is responsible for her mother’s death, and also she is in the final stage of becoming a nun, as evident by her wimple.
He walks her through his life’s grand quest, The Korda Land and Sea Phoenecian Infrastructure Scheme, with neatly laid out shoeboxes representing various projects: Prince Farouk (Riz Ahmed) and the Sacramento Consortium, Marseille Bob (Mathieu Amalric) and the Newark Syndicate, Cousin Hilda (Scarlett Johansson) and the Utopian Outpost, Emergency Directive, Uncle Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch) and the Korda Reliquary and Chez Zsa-zsa. Special shoutout to the publicist(s) who authored the film’s press notes, making life much easier for critics who struggle to catalog all the oddities throughout.
Of course, each box represents a chapter in the film. Zsa-zsa and Liesl visit partners on different projects, all of whom accuse the businessman of tinkering with the contracts and escalate disagreements to full-on confrontations. Within each segment, Zsa-zsa also suffers a near-death experience in black and white, where he is in what appears to be heaven to answer to, among others, God (Bill Murray).
Everything is perfectly organized and framed. The title sequence takes place in Zsa-zsa's bathroom, the length and width of which share the exact proportion as the Academy ratio, fitting perfectly in a ceiling shot. The border of the floor tiles creates a frame within the shot, as Zsa-zsa sits in the tub while five nurses tend to him. The film’s meticulous attention to detail extends to the books that Zsa-zsa reads inside his private jet, and yes, the press notes also include his reading list, which we will post on our Bluesky account in full once we hit 50k followers. One can fully acknowledge the craftsmanship involved while still admitting much of it is tedious.
Mr. Anderson does appear to have taken some of the valid criticisms over the year to heart instead of shrugging them off like Woody Allen. He seems to be making a real effort with “The Phoenician Scheme,” thoughtfully raising the diversity quotient. Still, it remains difficult to empathize with his cartoon characters or find heart in these tales. There’s supposed to be a moral to the story in a children’s book, and indeed there is some semblance of one in “The Phoenician Scheme.” But it registers as such an afterthought that one wishes Mr. Anderson would stop fussing over the visuals and invest more energy in finding the souls of his stories and characters.
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