Wes Anderson’s ‘The Phoenician Scheme’ Will Make You Scream

Rating: Can’t Be Rated

I don’t like the cinema of Wes Anderson. It reminds me of those disjointed, incoherent, self-consciously capricious film-school projects where the student wants to let the world know he doesn’t care a fig about the rules.

Continuing his flabbergasting quest for the crest of quirkiness, Wes Anderson has now come up with The Phoenician Scheme, a film that rattles all rationale and stirs up a storm in a teacup. Like other Anderson oddities, this one too is visualized in cartoon-strip colours, mostly pale green, and a mood of mythologized satire, which itself is problematic for any serious viewing.

The primary parodic protagonist is an industrialist in the 1950s whom everyone calls Zsa Zsa. It is providential that Zsa Zsa is played by the astounding Benicio del Toro, who is to quirky cinema what Zac Efron is to straitlaced rom-coms.

If you put del Toro at the centre of Wes Anderson’s creative cavity, there is an immediate sense of quirky gravity. Sure enough, Benicio del Toro chugs along with his director’s clammy whimsicality. The actor does a poker-faced version of Alice In Wonderland, going along with the fetishized vision of a world governed by greed and smothered by self-interest, with the shrug of a man who knows he is in it for better or worse.

What I noticed in this Wes Anderson creation is the outpouring of acting talent—Tom Hanks is drowned in futility while Benedict Cumberbatch at the climax won’t let you off the hook—and their placement in the strangest of locations.

There are several lengthy sequences in an elaborately—and of course quirkily—constructed interior of a private plane where the sitting arrangement indicates some kind of a hierarchical superiority for our hero Zsa Zsa, who suffers from an immortality complex. He feels he is immune from human frailties. His daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton) hates her father for sending her away to a convent when she was a mere child.

Now Zsa Zsa wants his daughter to be part of the family business. He has no faith in his adopted sons. Understandable, since we have no faith in the world that Zsa Zsa has inherited.

This is an insanely fantastical universe quivering under the weight of its own weightlessness. Trying to understand Wes Anderson’s directorial vision is to enter a tunnel lit by moody fireflies. There is a flicker of warmth and coherence here and there. But most of what Wes wants to say is lost in translation.

Zsa Zsa feels nothing can kill him. He should try watching Wes Anderson’s films instead of being in one of them.