After at least a fortnight’s delay—during which the snobbish part of me pretended to be annoyed by the fact that this film had flooded every cinema in the country, as if assuming everyone wanted to see it—I finally had to accept that nothing else was either worth seeing or hadn’t already watched twice. So there I was, sheepishly asking for a ticket and a statutory double vodka—just neat please, which often helps, not much the neatness as the drink itself—in the beautiful concretes of the Curzon Bloomsbury.
Beneath his beige and amber chessboard—proving that stylistic quirks, however peculiar, are far from limiting—Wes Anderson devices one of the most adventurous intrigues in recent cinema as a benevolent satire on the present age. Infusing his Victorian patisserie shop-window aesthetics with subtle cinephile references, Zsa-Zsa Korda evokes the many Kanes of film history to parody the delusional omnipotence of today’s no less capricious tycoons. While on the surface his characters may appear to be mere pawns in an arithmetic plot, The Phoenician Scheme unfolds with unexpected depth and thematic richness. Where it falters, alas, is in relying too heavily on intellectual post-processing, ultimately yielding an often lukewarm entertainment.