A burly Benicio Del Toro bench-pressed into a pale blue pinstripe suit, as snarling, gar-chomping magnate Zsa Zsa Korda at the yoke of a catastrophically felled plane, is quite the sight.
As the figurehead of Wes Anderson’s latest impeccably crafted, quirkily twee curio, The Phoenician Scheme, he is a citizen of no country. A sort of internationally adventuring cross between Indiana Jones and Howard Hughes, he is something of a brutalist, if the architecture were made man. Korda bulldozes his way across borders and directly through resistance, fiddling the books to cook up his latest nefarious business scheme.
Anderson borrows that eyebrow-raising moniker from Hungarian socialite actor Zsa Zsa Gabor and her filmmaking compatriots, brothers Alexander and Zoltan Korda, who made a splash in both Hollywood and the British film industry.
In other hands, we might be repelled by the bullish Korda, but Del Toro smooshes Zsa Zsa’s camp sensibility into the brothers’ strong heads for business, forging an improbably charismatic captain of seriously fishy industry.
The Phoenician Scheme: bombs away
Back to that crashing plane … I don’t think I’ve hooted quite so loudly at Anderson’s tartly mischievous visual jokes as I have at the quite horrific but unfortunately very funny fate of the poor fellow seated to the rear of the cabin in the film’s marvellously silly opening gambit.
Steve Park’s pilot fares a little better, but his firing would not pass muster when it comes to fair-work rules.
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Korda’s above-the-law-of-any-land dealmaking has irked a shadowy cabal of world leaders who, if the internet were invented yet (we’re in a pastel-hued postcard version of the 1950s) would surely spark a social media uproar. Hence the multiple assassination attempts stretched across the film’ refreshingly compact run-time.
The Phoenician Scheme: what plot?
Co-written with Roman Coppola, son of Francis Ford, there’s not a massive amount of plot. An absolutely marvellous Mia Threapleton, daughter of Kate Winslet, plays Korda’s only daughter, Liesl. A novice committed to becoming a nun under the watchful eye-roll of Hope Davis’s arch Mother Superior, Liesl is fantastically deadpan and entirely unimpressed by her father’s amoral assault on decency, signalled with a spot-on shrug.
But not so removed from lowly worldly affairs as to resist the bait when he insists on naming her as the sole beneficiary of his vast and venal wealth, reasoning that it can boost the convent’s good work. This despite a bevy of younger brothers, whose various mothers have all been murdered, as has Liesl’s.
She suspects Korda’s the villain, but what of his equally nefarious brother, Nubar? A gleefully scenery-chewing Benedict Cumberbatch makes the most of a too-brief cameo.
Arming herself with a bejewelled dagger (!!!), Liesl joins Korda’s madcap attempt to rescue his business from internationally aligned vengeant bankruptcy. Taking them across deserts by overground and underground train and into those deadly skies, this ‘Phoenician scheme’ traverses Modern Greater Independent Phoenicia, essentially a colonially-skewed, fairy-tale version of a nebulous Middle Eastern nation.
The Phoenician Scheme: a frothy treat
Lushly conjured up by Anderson’s loyal production designer Adam Stockhausen, as playfully lensed by Amelie cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel and swooshingly scored by Alexandre Desplat, The Phoenician Scheme is a frothy treat.
An aerial establishing shot of Korda recuperating in the tiled bathroom attended by multiple nurses as the opening credits roll is golden, as is the Conclave-recalling, palatially Italianate glory of the rest of Korda’s home.
As ever in Anderson’s filmography, there’s a stacked cast of stars to crowbar in cameos both fleeting and more fully teased out.
Highlights include a spiffily suited Riz Ahmed as the dapper Prince Farouk, better at basketball than might be expected for a man unused to such sport.
Michael Cera magnificently hams up his turn a Bjorn, his sons’ corduroy-wearing Norwegian tutor, who has a lot more going on than at first it might appear. Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston barely register, with Scarlett Johannson a little more to the fore as a fairly non-committal, kissing cousins love interest for Korda that’s more business than pleasure.
Jeffrey Wright brings a salty crackle to a sailor hat-wearing fellow traveller in the grey areas of international finance, with Richard Aayode’s black turtleneck-wearing, gun-toting revolutionary a delight, too, as is Mathieu Amalric’s Marseille-raised club owner.
But the shortest and best appearance belongs to a near-silent Bill Murray as the Almighty in gloriously Bergman-like black-and-white sequences that hint at Korda’s more mournful inner musing on absent fatherhood and his legacy while upping the ante on the hilarity with at least a hint of Bill & Ted too.
It’s a hoot, and Threapleton is a revelation, more than holding her own with Del Toro and rocking a dazzling white habit as sparkling as her perfectly comic-timed performance.
More grounded than some of Anderson’s flights of fancy, even if it feels a little rushed in its conclusion, The Phoenician Scheme is a thoroughly delightful ride and never – however hard that cabal may try – a crashing bore.
