Wes Anderson's The Phoenician Scheme: An adventure in stylised political subtext

By Cianan Sheekey

Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Phoenician Scheme.

Praise for the stylistic brilliance of Wes Anderson’s films is often met with equal parts criticism for their dearth of substance. Anderson makes films that are quirky, meticulously symmetrical, idiosyncratic, and usually made up of fragmented plot threads. You often need a magnifying glass, your best Holmesian hat, and a deeply detail-oriented patient mind to comprehensively grasp an Anderson film. These necessities uncover the heavy political subtext of Anderson’s latest brilliantly bizarre adventure, The Phoenician Scheme (referred to as solely Phoenician Scheme from here).

Phoenician Scheme is the most politically timely of Anderson’s productions. At a time when the Middle East is enduring a “spectacular dystopia of cities plummeted into sawdust”, Phoenician Scheme is set in a wholly different Middle East – one not butchered by war, botched European imperial withdrawals, or violent ethnonationalism. Instead, the film depicts power in the region through aristocrats and monarchs vying for authority, power, and ultimately, capital.

One such aristocrat is the film’s lead, Zsa-Zsa Korda, an egregiously wealthy arms dealer who manages to continually evade assassination despite the best attempts of outside influences. Zsa-Zsa enlists his daughter, Liesl, a novice nun, as the sole heir to his vast fortune, amidst fears that his plan to overhaul Phoenician infrastructure using slave labour will be his demise.

The immorality of his actions, and need to seek further involvement from investors, sees Zsa-Zsa and his daughter go on a journey that involves numerous visits to Heaven, an intense basketball point contests, several plane crashes, a meeting with God, and an intimate hug with a live hand grenade, in which Zsa-Zsa is presented with a choice. A choice between his portfolios: the portfolio of enterprise, comprising control, wealth, and moral indifference, or the portfolio of family, comprising human connection, material normality, and spiritual morality.

Anderson is suggesting, as he did in Fantastic Mr. Fox, that, in pursuit of something better, we need to again focus on what unites us and not divides us.

Similarly to Anderson’s previous film, the brilliant Asteroid City, Phoenician Scheme is blessed with sun-kissed vistas. These glorious landscapes are metaphorically illuminated in other ways: they are not unburdened by the same geopolitical hauntings of reality. This is a two-fronted statement of intent, commenting on both how Phoenician Scheme is not a message on the contemporary Middle East, and precisely that it cannot be one in such a geopolitical climate. At a time when the world is racked by the war in Gaza and escalating Israeli-Iranian tensions, such a separation is sensible.

To speak politically of a different version of events through an Andersonian counterfactual (in a region renowned for its perpetual conflicts) is itself a pronounced message, suggesting we must detach ourselves from our conceptions of history and its web of grief to imagine something better. Anderson is suggesting, as he did in Fantastic Mr. Fox, that, in pursuit of something better, we need to again focus on what unites us and not divides us.

By essentially removing statecraft from the equation and instead focusing on an imaginary set of oligarchs, Anderson creates a narrative which can be far more tangibly understood. Instead of complex, interweaving long-standing relations, and international goals, we have scheming, manipulative oligarchs. By stripping back the role of the state, the film frees itself from the burdens of the large, complicated nature of bureaucratic governmental relations – facilitating a story in which individuals serve the same role. This outlines the importance of publicly unseen individuals within geopolitics, and reinforces the narrative power of individuals to seek out morality through family, religion, and personal sacrifice. Anderson’s taking on the oligarchs, suggesting that their vicious influence over the world is being hidden from us as they squabble over unruly and unnecessary material wealth. But he’s also sending them a message of a kinder sort.

As Jesse Hassenger of QC writes, “it’s difficult not to think of Trump during The Phoenician Scheme”. From Zsa-Zsa’s “fiddling” of trade agreements, perpetual bargaining, and lack of ethical code, Phoenician Scheme (which was written and filmed during the Biden years) has a lead who – although not definitively Trump – is certainly Trump-esque . At least the type of industrialist Trump, or similar influential fiscal leaders would have looked up to.

Using Zsa-Zsa as a symbolic representative of these figures, or who they aspire to be, is a coy political message to the world’s powerful uber-affluents. He chases the utmost capital and influence, and all it results in is meaningless wealth, turning his back on morality, his family, and his own safety for the sake of a vapid goal. At the end of the film, he does reject it all, sacrificing his immense fortune so that his scheme may occur in a humanitarian manner through circumvent the usage of slave labour. He opens a cafe with his daughter Liesl, who has turned away from her overt religious convictions (alluding to the notion that one does not have to sacrifice one’s life to God to be moral). They seem happy.

It is upon a humbling conclusion the film leaves us, suggesting there may be far more joy hidden away from the plays of power politics, in quiet lives in touch with ourselves, our friends, families, and our principles. The irony is that it is doubtful that those to whom this message is aimed at will ever see this film, teaching us a lesson which we, the actual audience, need not be taught.

A bold adventure in nuanced political subtext expertly embedded in a captivating narrative, Anderson has once again struck cinema gold in a stylised outing that takes on the world’s oligarchs in a counterfactual Middle East that provides all of us, especially Trump and the leaders of the Arabian Peninsula, with an important lesson: happiness is more bountifully found in the quaint and meek than in any lust for global political power.

Image: Martin Kraft