Wes Anderson is contemporary cinema’s crown prince of mannerism – and still one of its most polarising figures. Whenever one of his new features appears, it provokes near-allergic reactions among detractors who simply can’t stomach the director’s whimsy and very arch storytelling style. To his admirers (this reviewer included), he’s a unique filmmaker, one who combines wit and brittle sophistication with child-like naivety. The Phoenician Scheme (in competition in Cannes) is one of his most enrapturing works of recent times, witty, packed with arcane literary and artistic references, but also full of plenty of refreshingly juvenile humour.
We’re in the early 1950s. The film’s hero, played by a dashing and mercurial Benicio Del Toro, is business tycoon Zsa-zsa Korda. He’s a sort of Elon Musk of his era but with more charisma and a better dress sense. There’s also a hint of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane about him – nobody, least of all himself, knows quite what makes him tick. Korda is forever having bust-ups in boardrooms and near-death experiences in his aeroplanes, which crash on a regular basis.
