The heart of film is visual style, and Wes Anderson is one of the most stylized directors working today. He is certainly the most popular of the great formalists. And I haven’t given much analysis of his films before - their class commentary is usually too obvious. But the Venetian scheme is a good starting place. As always spoilers below the cut.
As I’ve written before that stories can be broken down into archetypal stories and humanist stories. An archetypal story is like a fairytale or tragic theatre or mythological tales. They show the characters as - I don’t want to say simple but - bold and clear. They stand for things and have bold definitive lines drawn around them and not much else. Superman is a classic archetype. So is Darth Vader, or Jesus, or Santa Claus, or Anton Chirguh. They rarely have much internality that we have the audience are exposed to. They are pure action and style. They repeat meaningful lines.
Humanist stories are the ones that complicate those tales. Like any parody of fairytales that goes on about how these characters would really react, humanist stories ask what is the economy in the this world? What do they think about their role? What are their secret resentments in their secret dreams? What made them in their youth the way they are now? Those are all very good questions, but answering them, tears down the image of the archetype.
Uncut Gems is humanist, and Kino’s Journey is archetypal. If you ask what causes a character to act this way, you’re making the story more humanist, if you’re asking what visual language can be used to express this character, it’s more archetypal. Movies that undercut grand dramatic statements with quippy irony, are polluting archetypal figures with humanist self-awareness. Even when these two genres are combined, it’s usually easy to pull those aspects apart, like I bet you can do it right now for The Nightmare Before Christmas just by thinking about it.
Wes Anderson confounds me because he’s the only director that I can’t simply identify this way. He has this incredibly strong, visual language that is so archetypal. It’s a God’s Eye View and by that I don’t mean we see everything from above, but that like God, we see everything in the same plane and the same focus. There is no relative position of the characters because they are all in the dead center in the camera, staring directly at us. And these characters are very broad caricature types. They exude their identity from every pour and have very little self-awareness. There is no real subtlety to them, and frankly, they act absurd for how a real human would act.
All the scenery is twee and more like a dollhouse than actual locations. All the colors are bright and contrasted very strongly.
And yet.
And yet at the core of every single one of his characters is a tenderness that is so complex and human. The journey of almost all of his movies is for the most buffoonish character to peel back their own layers and arrive at their most vulnerable emotions. The archetype is torn down, and the characters are reborn often as simply another archetype instead of something more human. But it’s progress.
The Phoenician scheme struck me as commentary on this phenomenon more than any of his previous movies.
Besides the well delivered jokes, the best line in the entire movie is when our male protagonist is addressing his evil, stubborn brother and declares “you’re not human, you’re biblical!”
The thematic arc of this movie is that Zsazsa has a particular image of himself as a ruthless, invincible deal maker. And given how he survives that plane crash and he treats the staff around him this seems fairly accurate.
And then he has to go convince trading partners of his around the world to lend him money when he desperately needs it. He plans to intimidate them and trick them and take advantage of them like the ruthless salesman he is. And the way the movie is structured as five different episodes each trying to achieve the same goal with a different person is like a video game where you have to go to five different worlds collecting the elemental emeralds or whatever. Very archetypal story time.
But the way he gets money from each of these people is not by his archetype;s skills. They give him money out of friendship, prayer to the heavens, pity, as reward for sacrificing himself for someone else, and maybe marital union. His old tricks don’t work for him and it is instead a human existence that saves him.
We see similar but smaller scale transformations, with his daughter and her scooter. His daughter Lucy believes her herself to be an archetypal who is pious and beyond all worldly temptations, but over the movie, realizes that she enjoys worldly temptations very much and is more suited to a worldly (human) life. Michael Sara‘s Bjorn looks like one sort of archetype and then reveals beneath it... he has another. A suave spy straight out of a thirties novel.
If Lucy is Zsazsa’s “better self” reflection, than his brother Nubar is his darker half reflection. Nubar has not sacrificed any of his archetypal traits for humanity. He’s a got a large, semitic beard.
You’re not human, you’re biblical.
Through the movie, Zsazsa has near death encounters, and dreams of what might be the afterlife, among heavenly clouds and judgmental Old Testament figures. In them Zsazsa takes part in arcane ceremonies that don’t really SAY anything, even his encounter with the Almighty. It is all extremely archetypal.
During the movie, Zsazsa has frequently been accused of slavery. He asks why is that bad. God says so, of course. “Really, in the Bible?” This movie is much more representative of the Old instead of the New Testmanent, and everyone (Lucy, the heavenly) stand awkwardly around while they remember God’s blase attitude towards slavery in many instances.
The biblical figures in this movie represent themselves as figures of almighty moralism, but are deflated when forced to acknowledge the actual history of their religions. They are awkwardly humanized.
Now, the resolution of the slavery and famines Zsazsa has organized, is hilariously trivialized with a newspaper headline saying “Slaves will be paid! Famine will be ended!” as if such crimes against humanity can be undone like flipping a switch. (A slave who is paid… is still a slave.) This great moral crime is an afterthought, beyond the purpose, compared to the redemption of one man who was committing it. Wes is certainly in on the joke.
And in the end, Zsazsa, Lucy, and Bjorn don’t become nuanced, internal human figures. They just become different archetypes. They are still simple and stylized-externally, they still repeat their refrains. So I can’t even say this movie is about pure humanization, as in something like TNBC. But at least a transformation of sorts has occurred.
***
If you want to understand the Phoenician Scheme more, I recommend this video analyzing the last three movies by Wes as a trilogy of sorts. Sadly, spoilers for all three movies involved.
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