Wes Anderson possesses a rare talent for unfolding family secrets like others open a chest of antique silk. With The Phoenician Scheme, presented in the official selection at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and expected in theaters on May 28, the American filmmaker returns to his primary obsession: blood ties, burdensome legacies, and the delicate absurdities that govern the private lives of the powerful.
The film opens on an isolated building, somewhere between Switzerland and an imaginary Central European country. The light seems filtered through a toile de Jouy fabric, the furniture evokes a bank temple converted into a convent, and each shot is composed like an old painting framed with irony. We meet Zsa-Zsa Korda, one of the continent's richest men, a tycoon frozen in his routines, played by a hieratic, almost mineral Benicio del Toro. He lives surrounded by very much alive ghosts: his daughter Liesl, recently taken to a religious order, but whose faith seems more conceptual than mystical, and Bjorn, their appointed guardian, a strange figure with an overly polite smile, portrayed with mathematical precision by Michael Cera. With this unlikely trio, Anderson constructs a narrative labyrinth where the dialogue crackles like maxims, where architecture becomes a character, and where objects—rococo crucifixes, ivory fountain pens, unused pianos—speak volumes. Everything here is a matter of appearances. But as always with Anderson, the surface conceals abysses. Behind the pastel draperies and the clear-lined monologues, there are silences that scream. Power dynamics as subtle as they are implacable. Unspoken truths transformed into family rules. The Phoenician Scheme is a comedy about dynasties, but a comedy whose foundations are crumbling. It is also a disguised reflection on capitalism, inheritance, memory, and religion as refuge or camouflage. All of this, of course, within a visual universe of obsessive sophistication: symmetrical corridors, impeccable cuts, palettes of browns, lilacs, and antique golds. It evokes a monastery for billionaires, or a Visconti film reimagined by a Japanese illustrator. It is perhaps Wes Anderson's most dense, melancholic, and enigmatic film. Behind the exquisite elegance of each frame, one perceives a weariness, a hint of the end of an era. As if, for the first time, the filmmaker were accepting that beauty, however masterful, is no longer enough to fix everything.
The Phoenician Scheme doesn't try to seduce. It envelops. It hypnotizes. It gently scratches beneath the surface. And when you leave the theater, a strange impression remains: that of having visited a velvet mausoleum, where family sorrows are whispered in Latin, and where each heir already bears the weariness of their own name engraved on a plaque.
