‘The Phoenician Scheme’: Delicate, detached, divine

Wes Anderson has never been one for messy grief; he prefers it neat, folded into pocket squares, and served with a side of witty annotation. ‘The Phoenician Scheme’ is that temperament writ very large: an elegy in pastels about a man trying to auction off his own meaning, and a daughter trying, as daughters do, to file the receipts of a life into something that resembles reconciliation.

Benicio del Toro’s Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda, sculpted in melancholy and moustache wax, is a study in curated regret — an oligarch who treats the world as if it were a set of chessmen to be varnished and passed on. He evades assassination attempts, remarking dryly, “Myself, I feel very safe” — even reaching heaven in one sepia-toned sequence that seemingly borrows, impeccably, from ‘The Colour of Pomegranates’ (1968).

Mia Threapleton’s Liesl, his daughter, carries the film’s soft revolt like a line in a poem that makes you rethink the stanza before it. Playing a nun-in-training entrusted with her father’s estate, Threapleton inhabits the role with such delicious ease it feels as if she were born out of some divine conspiracy for the film itself. A tender love between Liesl and Michael Cera’s Bjorn, a puppy-eyed Norwegian, lends the narrative a fragile warmth.

When we first see Palazzo Korda, the oligarch’s mansion, Anderson turns the camera into a mischievous conspirator. In one frame, we see the ornate exterior; in the next, the same facade is painted onto the interior walls — a sly jab at bourgeois self-worship.

The star-studded supporting cast (Scarlett Johansson, Willem Dafoe, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hanks, Riz Ahmed, and others) adds little, caressing the nape of the narrative, only to vanish before one can fully admire its presence.

If you love Anderson for the ritual of his aesthetics, this film will feed you. The yellows are so earnest they seem to apologise for existing, while the blues hold their breath until the shadows behave.

Even the clouds look like they’ve been ironed.

The mise-en-scene — less set design, more psychosis — is obsessive in the best way.

Set in a fictional 1950s’ Middle Eastern (West Asian) “potentially rich but dormant” region of Phoenicia, the film feels alarmingly prophetic: when God-fearing Liesl objects to Korda’s inclination to use slave labour, he replies, “Was God against it in the Bible?” — a line that lands like a scalpel.

In another surgical satire, “Oh, that’s us,” he quips, when questioned about the region’s famine. Elsewhere, a world leaders’ meeting convenes to discuss him (their common arch nemesis): “He provokes war... and peace,” one leader groans.

However, after riding the high of Anderson’s visual grammar, sobriety sometimes punctures in like sunlight through torn curtains. You may find yourself pausing for a snack, in part because the pacing occasionally feels like the most captivating conversation at an accountants’ conference; and in part because doom-scrolling has permanently rewired the portion of our brains that once held patience.

Still, persevere — because ‘The Phoenician Scheme’ rewards you for endurance. It is a satire that’s melancholic, a comedy that’s philosophic, a fashion show for existential dilemmas. The genius cinematography and the liquid-electricity writing steep you in overwhelming beauty, and you seldom get a chance to come up for air — but when you do, the frame softens for a fragile heartbeat, the joke is suspended, and the air tastes oddly holy.