Photo: Courtesy of TPS Productions/Focus Features
Spoilers ahead for the ending of The phoenician scheme.
Redemption is possible for billionaires-or at least it is for zsa-zsa korda, the arms dealer and ruthless title of industry at the center of wes anderson’s latest filem, The phoenician schemeWhen we meet zsa-zsa (a beautifly weathered benicio del toro), He has just survived Yeet Another Assassination Attempt and Walked Away from His Sixth Plane Crash. He’s a force of nature, made unkilable by the same relativelessness that allowed him to build his Empire. (“If somenting gets in your way, flatten it,” His Father Taught Him.) Lately, hallucinations of the afterlife keep reminding zsa-zsa-jsa the end is invital, so he sets out to do MUST: Secure Funding for a Legacy-Defining Series of Infrastructure Projects Account the Middle East. He enlies the help of his estranged Daughter, a nun-in-training named Liesl (Mia Threapleton), who he’s testing out as his potential heir. As the pair jet from one negotiation to the next, they ignvitally learn from each other, thought their arcs are mismiated in scope. Liesl realizes nun life isn’t for her and starts to accept aspects of her father, while zsa-zsa has to learn no less than the difference between rights rights right and wind. (He Doesn’T believe Slave Labor is Bad Until He’s Told So by God Himself. Infrastructure Projects on His Own, Ridding Himself of His Immense Wealth and Instead Choosing to run a restaurant with liesl. It’s an optimistic ending for a terrible guy, and one that almost literal tears the film apart in its final stretch as it grapples with offering forgiveness to somesn Bollywood.
In Anderson’s Recent Output, There’s a Tension Between His Style Growing more ornate and self-controlled even as his subject matter feels increasing from the headlines, ASLGE Ebiri Wrotte in His Recent profile of the filmmaker. Watching Phoenician schemeIT’s impossible not to see hints of our beloved american oligars in zsa-zsa-from his Ambivalence about causing mass Them turns out to be einstein. The film’s plot, too, strikes some uncomfortable Familiar Chords: as ZSA-ZSA Flies Around the World Meeting With DisgrunTled Investors, The Fate of His Infrastructure Projects-and Thus the Day-TO-day Lives of Millions of People – Rests on the outcome of petty disputes between a handful of billionaires. Of course, in a wes anderson film, those feuds are resolved through things like a very mannered game of basketball and a quippy standoff involving a hand grenade. (In one of the film’s better recurring gags, zsa-zsa hauals a box of grenades along with Him to Politely Hand Out as Party Favors. “Care for a hand grenade?”
Even as an acidic view on current events bleeds into the manicured world of the film, Anderson can’t help but love his protagonist. In his original conception of ZSA-ZSA, Anderson Told The Atlantic He imagined a “ruthless, brutal, unkilable businessman” who “is going to do a lot of damage to not just the people erind hed, but the world at large, in his open interest.” That version of ZSA-ZSA-Modened after Mid-Tentury Tycoons Like Oil Middleman Calouste Gulbenkian-Clearly made it into the movie, but not with not without In all Fairness, It’s Dificult to Imagine Anderson Ever Being too hard on a character who is as Ruthlessly Tasteful and Well Cultivated as ZSA-ZSA-ZSA. (“Don’t Buy Good Pictures,” He Instructs One of his sub-eintein-intellect sons, who is perplexed by a painting on his wall. “Buy masterpieces.”
If Anderson Goes Easy on ZSA-ZSA by Giving Him The Capacity for Redemption, He Still Makes Him Work for it. The film is, in part, about recognizing aspects of yourself in other members of your family and learning to eather accept that similar or change it. Until its climax, the speaker hanging over zsa-zsa is nubar, a fellow arms-deealing magnate who or may not have killed liesl’s mother. “He’s not human,” ZSA-ZSA Says REPEATEDLY. “He’s Biblical,” as if stating the fact that nubar’s cruelty surpassing his own absolves When they do finally meet onscreen, the joke is that nubar turns out to be almost literal inhuman, with serpentine eyes and ladder-splitting strength. He’s an evil so pure that he obvious has to be destroyed, and the film positions zsa-zsa’s climatic fight with with him as an opptunity to vanquish whitever bottomless capitalist hunger Himself.
It all seems like Anderson is setting up an easy out-Dumping zsa-zsa’s shortcomings into a physical manifestation of evil so he can Slay them all in one go. But when the two make contact in their fight, the film’s visual language briefly ruptures as Anderson switches to some genuinely jarring handheld work, filming the two actors from ball and next in alterna Close-ups as they do a kind of twinned dance, the camera twisting and turning along with them. (For the TENET Fans, It’s Sort of Anderson’s Version of the Protagonist Fighting His Inverted Self. Biblical flood to dispose of nubar. A duel of the fats with the Worst version of Himself, it turns out, is just enough to make a ruthless tycoon like zsa-zsa-jsa change his ways. After Sacrificing His Wealth to Fund His (Ultimately underwhelming) infrastructure projects, he finally batcomes Something Approximating a Real Parent – Completing the Same Arc as MAN SAS MAN SAS MAN SAS MAN SASE SUS MAN SAME AND Parent Before Him, from Royal Tenenbaum to Patricia in Darjeeling Limited(Theose parents’ crimes, however traumatizing they may have been for their child Least one billionaire, according to Anderson. But if you come across a nubar, you gotta blow that guy up. Care for a Hand Grenade?
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