Wes Anderson’s master prank in Cannes – Diepresse.com
The new film by the US director tells of a business robber baron and his daughter, a prospective nun: why the true story could almost be overlooked.
A film from Wes Anderson can be seen at first glance. In « The Phoenician Scheme » there is a rich industrialist (Benicio del Toro) in a two -row suit with a cigar between the thick fingers in his private aircraft, in the background you can see a strictly strapped strain on a good assistant. There is hardly any time to grasp all the colored details in the time color of the 1950s, when a floor hits, the assistant is torn out and the crash threatens. In a real action film you would see the plane tumbling and cracking, but at Wes Anderson the artistically arranged scenes from the cockpit are immediately followed by the artistically arranged camera trip along the picturesk, accompanied by an old-fashioned radio that announces the death of the legendary businessman « Zsa-Zsa Korda ». But then Korda comes back into the picture at the end of the camera trip. Wounded, but well.
The whole, in its mixture of loving handicrafts and student theater-like improvisation, is reminiscent of the zeal with which the teenage hero from Anderson’s « Rushmore » from 1998 brought the Vietnam War onto the stage of his « Prep School ». In fact, given « The Phoenician Scheme » (« The Phoenician Master Cast »), his latest work, which has now been presented in Cannes, could be assumed to the American director an « Arrested Development ». Everything seems as usual: the sets are elaborated, the dialogues are « Deadpan », the mood nostalgic and most of the faces are old acquaintances in the Anderson universe. Does the 56-year-old really don’t develop anymore?
Del Toro as a predatory businessman
Del Toro embodies the businessman Korda, whose extremely gross way of deal-made and over-the-table draws involuntarily think of Trump. But such short -circuited political allusions to the United States of the present would be completely foreign. His fantasies are still arrested in the 20th century and earlier. Korda is more of a robber baron of the old school, somewhere between « Gilded Age » and « Citizen Kane ». It is not for nothing that the great life’s work, of which he dreams, is a gigantic infrastructure project that wants to create a kind of wealthy machine from water and rail paths, on a fictional, vague of Arabia-reminiscent peninsula called Phönizien. Since the aircraft attack was already the toughest attack on his life from the beginning, Korda decides to reconcile with his 20-year-old daughter Liesl (Kate Winslet’s daughter Mia Threapleton), a prospective nun and use her to be heir. From then on, the plot lends the encounters with various donors of the project, dubious desert prince, creation relatives, eccentric businesses in an exotic backdrop. The true story, however, takes place between father and daughter, so hidden and behaving that you could almost overlook it.
Every new scenery is at a unique ingenuity. Among other things, Anderson films a bathroom from the ceiling view as if it were a doll room. Since Korda is the goal of further attacks on his travels-various governments and organizations are based on his life-there are always seam-death experiences in which he has to step in front of the gods of different faiths, one of which is embodied by a wonderfully mul-rotten Bill Murray. But Korda survives again and again. Instead of being repelled by all the violence and the shady methods, the hardened daughter feels more and more connected to him, while he himself is more and more willing to respond to her demands for more humane behavior. If you see them playing at a table at the end, the decor has changed more than just. Somehow Anderson succeeded in developing complex figures from what was still caricatures at the beginning that touch.
Great: Mia Threapleton and Michael Cera
The Benicio del Toro is thanks to the Benicio del Toro, which has not been seen for a long time with so much use of soul, and the two new additions among the Anderson collaborators, Mia Threapleton and Michael Cera. Threapleton is wonderfully minimalistic as a pragmatic novice that does not want to be fooled, but still struggles with her conscience. And Michael Cera, who accompanies the father-daughter couple as a Norwegian tutor Bjorn, plays so wonderfully eccentric in the background as if he were actually born in this world.
