Wes Anderson has a rare talent for unfolding family secrets as others open an antique silk chest. With The Phoenician Scheme, presented in official selection at the Cannes 2025 Film Festival and due in cinemas on May 28, the American filmmaker returns to his primary obsession: blood ties, heavy inheritances and the delicate absurdities that govern the intimacy of the powerful.
The film opens on an isolated building, somewhere between Switzerland and an imaginary Central European country. The light seems to filter through a toile de Jouy, the furniture evokes a banking temple converted into a convent, and each shot is composed like an ancient painting framed by irony. We meet Zsa-Zsa Korda, one of the richest men on the continent, a tycoon frozen in his automatisms, played by a hieratic, almost mineral Benicio del Toro. He lives surrounded by living ghosts: his daughter Liesl, who has recently taken holy orders, but whose faith seems more conceptual than mystical, and Bjorn, their appointed tutor, a strange figure with an overly polished smile, played by a mathematically precise Michael Cera. With this unlikely trio, Anderson constructs a narrative labyrinth where dialogues click like maxims, architecture becomes a character, and objects such as rococo crucifixes, ivory fountain pens and never-used pianos tell more than looks. Everything here is about surface. But as always with Anderson, the surface conceals abysses. Behind the pastel draperies and clear-cut monologues, there are silences that scream. Power relationships as subtle as they are implacable. Unspoken words transformed into family rules. The Phoenician Scheme is a comedy about dynasties, but one whose foundations crack. It's also a disguised reflection on capitalism, transmission, memory and religion as refuge or camouflage. All this, of course, in a visual universe of maniacal sophistication: symmetrical corridors, impeccable cuts, palettes of browns, lilacs and antique golds. It's like a monastery for billionaires, or a Visconti film revisited by a Japanese illustrator. This is perhaps Wes Anderson's most dense, melancholy and secretive film. Behind the precious elegance of every frame, we sense a weariness, a hint of the end of a reign. It's as if, for the first time, the filmmaker accepts 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 varnish. And when you leave the room, you're left with a strange impression: that of having visited a velvet mausoleum, where family sorrows are whispered in Latin, and each heir already bears the fatigue of his own name engraved on a plaque.
