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Cannes 2025: The Phoenician Scheme, Nouvelle Vague
Benicio del Toro, Michael Cera and Mia Threapleton in The Phoenician Scheme Though Wes Anderson’s last consensus-acclaimed feature was 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, his subsequent, progressively more divisive films have been profitable enough to emerge at a regular clip. I’m guessing this is thanks to the purchasing power of elder millennials who had Rushmore and Royal Tenenbaums imprinted on them in their teen years and now faithfully show up for each new work. For those unshakeable fans, myself included, the question of whether Anderson’s entered an era of baroque and inadvertent self-parody is a non-issue, and The Phoenician Scheme is unlikely to change anyone’s mind in either direction. Even by his own standards, it’s a conspicuously eccentric film that once again approaches the present moment through 20th-century analogy rather than direct engagement. (Exception: a firm closing credits statement that this may not be used for the purposes of training AI. Good man!)
At Phoenician’s center is another one of Anderson’s bad dads, joining a gallery composed of the glibly fast-talking paterfamilias of The Royal Tenenbaums, the more conspicuously depressive Steve Zissou, the dead father whose absence haunts The Darjeeling Limited and George Clooney’s unstoppable-and-unreflective Fantastic Mr. Fox. Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro) has nine sons and one extremely alienated daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), who’s so repulsed by him that she’s entered a convent. Their fraught relationship is a variation on the previous films’s father-son tensions; Anderson explains in the press kit (a bit like a mainstream American politician, but with more sincerity) that this is because he is now himself the father of a daughter.
The plot revolves around Korda’s intertwined efforts to win over his daughter while realizing an ambitious commercial real estate development project. In the press kit, Anderson cites a number of non-producer European tycoons as reference points for Korda, which is relevant but also a little misleading; per his last name, Korda is a businessman who’s really a stand-in film producer in a movie that’s literally about gap financing. A friend with an architecture background believes that artists love using architecture as a metaphor for the frustrations of realizing their own work, but that in the process they misunderstand how the discipline works: it should be “function first,” with beauty a bonus if possible. In that sense, The Phoenician Scheme is the inverse of The Brutalist, which operated precisely on the idea of architecture as the labor of a frustrated artist trying to get enough money from unsavory investors to realize his vision. Not so for Anderson: Korda’s project is ambitious but essentially non-artistic, focused around building new transportation routes. Its realization requires him to interface with unethical financiers, a necessity that goes beyond jokey cartoon characters like Mathieu Amalric (as “Marseille Bob”) when the CIA’s once-covert role in financing arts publications and other cultural endeavors as part of Cold War ideological sniping is invoked.
This unexpected fillip roots Phoenician in a very specific slice of 20th century political history that’s no less specific or engaged for all its elaborateness than Grand Budapest Hotel’s rendition of the rise of Nazism. Phoenician is characteristically meticulous (or overwhelming, depending on your taste) in every part of each frame. (Great, characteristic small detail: in Korda’s kitchen, there are two crates of eggs stacked on top of each other, the brown ones on a separate tier from the white ones.) But while this is on some level unavoidably Anderson reiterating his characteristic concerns and visual methods, this is the kind of movie indicating a director’s metabolism is slowing and we are entering Late Style. For the last decade or so, Anderson’s characters have tended to rattle off their dialogue in a cadence as stylized, speedy and potentially unforgiving as e.g. David Mamet. Now there are more silences and longer gaps between lines; as if to offset the potential of restless viewers misregistering this as dead air, there’s also more music than usual (mostly Stravinsky) playing constantly throughout, weirdly low in the mix as if the radio were left on. I liked the film as much for its oddnesses as its more familiarly successful, less alienating qualities.
Another Texas-born cinephile with an equally prodigious frame of viewing reference, Richard Linklater offers his own take on 20th-century filmmaking in Nouvelle Vague. The subject is the making of Breathless as rendered in the style of Breathless, which as a technical achievement is fairly astonishing: the black-and-white looks exactly right for the time period and the set dressing of Paris (and Cannes!) is immaculate. (The number of period-appropriate cars on the street are presumably a tribute to how far CG vehicles and their comping-in have come in the last decade; they’re photorealistic to a disturbing degree.) The film, however, is disappointingly pointless, the worst-case version of what I feared: a movie whose POV is basically “Breathless was cool.”
Granted, that isn’t how Linklater positions it in his press kit essay: he wanted to make his contribution to the plentiful making-of-a-movie genre while—per his characteristic love of groups of genial souls saying funny things—recreating the pleasure of the company of the people making this specific film, which is important to him. But while it’s obviously very impressive that Linklater is making a feature with the loose, limber handheld style and edits of 1959-era Godard, using a language he’s never deployed before and assimilates with astonishing smoothness, it’s to no real end. This is an expensive project dedicated to flawlessly pastiching a 60+-year-old style, which is obviously ironic when the film in question was all about revolutionizing cinema in part by being explicitly against cinema’s default resources and established traditions.
Vague’s version of film history is solid, introducing Godard (Guillaume Marbeck), Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), Chabrol (Antoine Besson) and Suzanne Schiffman (Jodie Ruth-Forrest) as a four-headed Cahiers core of quotable bitchiness, then briskly marching through the high-/low-lights of Breathless’s production. On day 1, a jubilant Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin, a dead ringer and charismatic find) announces “Let’s make cinema history.” “Let’s just make our day,” responds nervous producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst). Vague then restages Breathless’s most famous shots and anecdotal baggage while Godard delivers his greatest hits (a girl and a gun etc.); not that it’s really the point, but the late man himself would have hated this mausoleum dedicated to his earliest incarnation.
One of Linklater’s beloved pinball machines—plucked out of Pickpocket (whose production and director make a cameo here) and planted seamlessly into Slacker and Waking Life—is here restored to the chronological period of its origins. Godard is portrayed as a ceaseless quote-machine, which is…kind of fair, but still cartoonish. This allows him to defend both the movie he’s making and the one we’re seeing; the point, he says, is to blur the line between homage and plagiarism, because real artists steal. One of the things that have made Linklater one of the best filmmakers of his generation has been his ability to take his numerous influences and synthesize them into something distinctly his own; to watch this is as if to see him undoing all the work he’s done to make himself a distinct director, arriving back at the year zero of pure pastiche.
