The Phoenician Scheme
Jul. 2nd, 2025 10:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficAs I watched all of Wes Anderson’s films more or less in chronological order last year, I felt I had to watch his latest—in theaters this time! I went with my wife to see it. The only Wes Anderson she’d seen before was his short film “Poison,” so we knew this would be an abrupt entry into his filmography.
In brief—I enjoyed it. It’s very much an extension of the aesthetic he’s refined in The French Dispatch and Asteroid City. This is no brain all aesthetic. Yes, there is an overly complex plot, but it is mostly in service of incredibly twee sets and props and incredibly dry humor. But unlike some of his other films, The Phoenician Scheme has no heart at all. So if you want to spend two hours inside his doll’s house with quirky characters doing improbable things for inscrutable reasons, it’s a diversion.
The biggest problem—as has been true for many of Anderson’s films—is that his choice of aesthetic pays no attention at all to context or wider implications. And in this case, he went with vague Middle East which is very yikes read the room at the moment. Yes, the film was made before the most recent developments, but not before the war. At one point they show a map that is vaguely gesturing at Iran and the Levant. There’s a lot of ancient Egyptian iconography and Arabic text. The scheme of the movie is to build a dam, tunnel and railroad—which seems unavoidably to be about the Aswan Dam. But Anderson doesn’t deal at all with any of the issues brought up by invoking the construction of the Aswan Dam.
There are a lot of things you could say about the Aswan Dam—from the "donating" of Egyptian temples to countries that gave money for the construction, to the preservation of Egyptian sites that would be flooded (like Abu Simbel) with no consideration for Nubian sites, to it modernizing Egypt by controlling the Nile and providing electricity, to that control of the Nile destroying the fertility of the land, to the fact that the politician behind the project, Nasser, nationalized the Suez Canal and redistributed land. This movie says zero of those things. The dam is just a project, with no meaning or value beyond driving the plot.
The plot is about Zsa-Zsa Korda, an amoral arms dealer and king maker, trying to ensure his legacy through the completion of these construction projects. He brings in his only daughter, who is a novice (in the nun sense), to be his only heir. He is doing this to…unclear. Definitely not to improve the lives of locals (he casually mentions manufacturing a famine and using slave labor). To secure his own fortune—but he risks all of it to complete the project. The movie is a series of vignettes with the consortium of backers of the project to try to cover “the gap”—the shortfall in funding Korda has been hiding. All of these are colonial powers who are ensuring they can continue to extract wealth from this area—a fact the film is not interested in exploring.
So if you can turn your brain off to the sandbox he’s playing in, it’s fun. But ehhhhhhh timing, my dude.
In my survey of Anderson’s films, my read is that he is most interested in aesthetics, and when his aesthetics mesh with an emotional story, he makes some of the best films ever made (like “The Grand Budapest Hotel”), but most of the time, the aesthetics crowd everything else out. The films can still be fun, but are ultimately forgettable.
In brief—I enjoyed it. It’s very much an extension of the aesthetic he’s refined in The French Dispatch and Asteroid City. This is no brain all aesthetic. Yes, there is an overly complex plot, but it is mostly in service of incredibly twee sets and props and incredibly dry humor. But unlike some of his other films, The Phoenician Scheme has no heart at all. So if you want to spend two hours inside his doll’s house with quirky characters doing improbable things for inscrutable reasons, it’s a diversion.
The biggest problem—as has been true for many of Anderson’s films—is that his choice of aesthetic pays no attention at all to context or wider implications. And in this case, he went with vague Middle East which is very yikes read the room at the moment. Yes, the film was made before the most recent developments, but not before the war. At one point they show a map that is vaguely gesturing at Iran and the Levant. There’s a lot of ancient Egyptian iconography and Arabic text. The scheme of the movie is to build a dam, tunnel and railroad—which seems unavoidably to be about the Aswan Dam. But Anderson doesn’t deal at all with any of the issues brought up by invoking the construction of the Aswan Dam.
There are a lot of things you could say about the Aswan Dam—from the "donating" of Egyptian temples to countries that gave money for the construction, to the preservation of Egyptian sites that would be flooded (like Abu Simbel) with no consideration for Nubian sites, to it modernizing Egypt by controlling the Nile and providing electricity, to that control of the Nile destroying the fertility of the land, to the fact that the politician behind the project, Nasser, nationalized the Suez Canal and redistributed land. This movie says zero of those things. The dam is just a project, with no meaning or value beyond driving the plot.
The plot is about Zsa-Zsa Korda, an amoral arms dealer and king maker, trying to ensure his legacy through the completion of these construction projects. He brings in his only daughter, who is a novice (in the nun sense), to be his only heir. He is doing this to…unclear. Definitely not to improve the lives of locals (he casually mentions manufacturing a famine and using slave labor). To secure his own fortune—but he risks all of it to complete the project. The movie is a series of vignettes with the consortium of backers of the project to try to cover “the gap”—the shortfall in funding Korda has been hiding. All of these are colonial powers who are ensuring they can continue to extract wealth from this area—a fact the film is not interested in exploring.
So if you can turn your brain off to the sandbox he’s playing in, it’s fun. But ehhhhhhh timing, my dude.
In my survey of Anderson’s films, my read is that he is most interested in aesthetics, and when his aesthetics mesh with an emotional story, he makes some of the best films ever made (like “The Grand Budapest Hotel”), but most of the time, the aesthetics crowd everything else out. The films can still be fun, but are ultimately forgettable.