The Phoenician Scheme. 2025. USA/Germany. Written and directed by Wes Anderson. Story by Roman Coppola. With Benecio del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera. DCP courtesy Focus Features. 101 min.
Wes Anderson’s intricate, ambitious film traces the parallel journeys of Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda (Benicio del Toro), a ruthless arms dealer loosely modeled on Armenian oil magnate Calouste Gulbenkian, as he faces both earthly reckoning and divine judgment. After surviving an assassination attempt in 1950, Korda attempts to reconcile with his estranged daughter, Sister Liesl (Mia Threapleton), a Catholic novice whom he urges to abandon her vows and inherit his morally compromised empire. What begins as a globe-trotting caper involving infrastructure fraud in the fictional nation of Phoenicia gradually transforms into a sober meditation on legacy and redemption. A deeply personal project dedicated to Anderson’s late father-in-law, Lebanese engineer Fouad Malouf, the film echoes Orson Welles’s Mr. Arkadin (1955), with its portrait of a mysterious magnate attempting to erase his past as death approaches. Working for the first time with cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, Anderson employs an unusual 1.47:1 aspect ratio that creates a compressed, portrait-like frame emphasizing vertical space, while the black-and-white afterlife sequences mark a striking contrast to the film’s richly saturated earthly palette. The tonal shift continues a preoccupation with death and spirituality that began to peek out in Asteroid City (2023), deepening Anderson’s late-career engagement with questions of loss and transcendence.
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