The Phoenician Scheme

Phoenician Blind

The Phoenician Scheme
Directed by Wes Anderson
Germany/USA 2025
Indian Paintbrush
UK Cinema Release Print

Well, you know more or less what you are getting when you go to see a Wes Anderson movie and I’m very happy to report back that, yes, it’s yet another masterpiece which, in a few moments, actually had me laughing out loud... which I don’t usually do, even with comedies. It just happens that in this case, The Phoenician Scheme has a gradual build up where the absurdist situations and dead pan delivery of the various characters becomes suddenly joyful in the manner of the director’s previous movies.

Some of the usual suspects make up the cast (and some newcomers) with the main protagonists of this being the fantastic Benicio Del Toro as wealthy businessman Zsa-Zsa Korda (obviously derived from Zsa-Zsa Gabor and Alexander Korda, I would say), his almost a nun, possible daughter and heir Liesl (played brilliantly by Mia Threapleton) and new tutor Bjorn, played by Michael Cera. Other big names include Hope Davis, Jeffrey Wright, Willem Dafoe, Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Mathieu Amalric, Richard Ayoade, Benedict Cumberbatch and, in the role of God, Bill Murray.

Now, I probably didn’t completely understand the plot because I don’t have a financial brain but it involves Korda, Liesl and Bjorn globetrotting to procure funding for Korda’s latest series of profitable building investments while trying to escape industrial espionage and almost daily assassination attempts. Korda has a reputation for being killed a lot and, in the few minutes he spends dead between each horrendous injury, he goes into monochrome visions of a trial in heaven... where information is sometimes imparted to him.

The film probably shouldn’t work as well as it does and, I’m sure for those people who are not an admirer of the directors rigidly controlled compositions (in this movie they’re in pretty much a locked in 1.33:1 aspect ratio throughout) and comedic literal dialogue exchanges, this would probably seem like an interminable experience. I absolutely loved it though and people who are into this director’s meticulous take on the details and minutia of various characters should have a blast with this one too.

Backed up by Alexandre Desplat’s wonderful score (which is outrageously not on a CD soundtrack album at time of writing), the film is fast paced and starts off literally with a bang, during the first of many assassination attempts made throughout the movie. Indeed the incredibly violent thing which happens in the top right corner of the screen in a shot in an aircraft, deliberately signalled to the audience by a sound that seems to come from the left, is a great tool for future scenes set in an identical aircraft (of which there are many as the characters travel from country to country)... as the audience will no doubt be worrying about just what is about to happen every time they hear that first sound when the composition of the shot is, more or less, the same.

The film has a pretty good ending too... I’m not sure if it completely ties into the biblical imagery littered throughout the movie but there’s certainly a form of redemption for one of the characters in this, it seemed to me. But, either way, The Phoenician Scheme sings along at around 100 minutes and, frankly, I would have liked to have been watching it for another couple of hours more. I’ll certainly be scooping up the Blu Ray of this one as soon as it gets a release and would wholeheartedly recommend it to fans of cinema. Wes Anderson makes such good movies. Bring on the next one.

Dream Scenario

Dreamageddon!

Dream Scenario
Directed by Kristoffer Borgli
USA A24 2023
UK cinema release print.

Warning: This one has some spoilerage in
terms of discussing the concept and where it goes.

A brief shout out now to new movie Dream Scenario, written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli. This one stars Nicolas Cage as Paul Matthews, a professor at a university who has never really done much with his life and never gotten around to writing his book... instead he resents that others are profiting from the same field of research as he and he comes across as a bit of a non-person, in many ways. That is until he starts invading other people’s dreams, through no fault of his own. After an opening sequence where we witness a dream experienced by one of his daughters (and I don’t think that’s particularly a spoiler... it was obvious to me from the first shot that we were in a dream) he hears how he was just a passive person in the dream... not responding to what was going on around him as anything special and not really helping out. He is a little concerned, after hearing this, that he’s seen like this in real life by both his two daughters and his wife (played by Julianne Nicholson).

However, after a few more scenes it turns out that a lot of people have suddenly started dreaming about him, from all over the world and that his persona in these dreams, one of someone who is just a casual, uninterested observer, is the common denominator (for a while). Paul becomes an overnight media sensation and is highly sought after as advertising fodder for high profile creative companies such as one run by Trent, played by Michael Cera (in the kind of role I’ve not seen him do before but he’s very good in this) and for various interviews. However, there’s a point in the movie where one person he meets has a dream where he’s not as passive but, when the young woman in question tries to co-opt him into reliving her personal dream fantasy of him, it goes kinda wrong and, suddenly, from that point on... things change.

Suddenly, Paul is seen killing and terrorising various people in their dreams and, all of a sudden, nobody wants to be around him... this affects his job, his wife’s job and various other things in his life. Even Paul himself is, as I kinda knew he would be once the movie started going down this path, haunted by himself in an aggressive dream fantasy and suddenly, the film shifts gears and becomes all about the bizarrely modern trend of ‘cancel culture’ and how it affects the innocent victims as much as people who have truly done anything wrong.

And it’s a nice little movie. It almost outstays its welcome in the last quarter of an hour or so when it takes another turn into what happens when the whole phenomenon stops but, it doesn’t quite wrongfoot itself and the way it ends is as nice a way as any (and I was waiting for that oversized novelty Talking Heads jacket to make an appearance in the film since an early reference to it). There are also some nice things going on technically, such as an early scene where Paul is recording a dinner conversation on his phone and the dinner is cross cut with him listening to the recording in his car. At some point in the sequence, the audio properties of the recording of the conversation juxtapose the images of the actual conversation and we then subtly shift, perhaps, into Paul’s visual memories of the conversation as exhibited by that shift in audio quality, which is visually no different whatsoever to the actual scene as it plays out. Which is a really nice thing to do with it, I thought.

In terms of tone, the film is hard to pin down but it reminded me a little bit of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries but leaning heavily into Woody Allen’s homage to that film in Deconstructing Harry. And then, towards the end, there’s a Philip K. Dick kind of epilogue to the whole story which brings it almost into the realm of soft science fiction. And yeah, a short review of the film, for sure but, that’s me done with Dream Scenario, I think. It’s an interesting look at the way an innocent victim’s life can be turned upside down by events which are completely nothing to do with that person but still invite the wrath of the world to your doorstep. An interesting film for lovers of cinema, I would say. Very much worth a look.