The Phoenician Scheme is fantasy. It is also a remarkable engagement with the real-life conflict in the Middle East

The Phoenician Scheme, Wes Anderson's makebelieve treatment of the war-ravaged near east, reimagines the region as a sunlit Levantine fantasia of cypress trees, fez hats, camel-riders and kitsch hotels, all photographed with the lustre of an Ottolenghi cookbook. Meanwhile, livestreamed daily to our news feeds, the warlords of the Holy Land exhibit for us an equally spectacular dystopia of cities pummelled into sawdust, of skies scarred with scorching white phosphorus and gun-toting paragliders.
How could these images be of the same place? What does it mean that they have been produced at the same time, and that we are consuming them alongside each other?
The film is set in the Middle East of a parallel universe. It's 1950, but decolonisation, the Holocaust, the world wars – none appear to have taken place; history has stalled in a kind of perpetual belle époque, leaving only a pastiche of the orient in its imperial heyday, meticulously reconstructed in the film's geography and production design, its storylines and characters.
In place of the warring states unleashed by Europe's botched withdrawal from its imperial mandates, the entire Levant forms a single nominally sovereign territory known as Modern Greater Independent Phoenicia, named after the ancient civilisation once inhabiting what would now be Lebanon, Palestine and Israel. Those national demarcations don't exist in the film, as you can see from all the quaintly displayed trademark Wes Anderson cartography, the whole region pristinely undivided – as it was before the first world war.
All the ethnic and sectarian squabbles that beleaguer these lands in the real world are magically replaced by a peaceable patchwork of aristocratic families, each with their respective toeholds. Their inflated titles mean nothing, their names allusions to the toothless dynasties once patronised by imperial overlords.
The film's King Hussein refers to more than one Hashemite monarch installed by Britain and Prince Farouk to Egypt's last king. The fact that a svelte Riz Ahmed has been cast to play a character, whose real-life inspiration, King Farouk, was a worldwide celebrity infamous for his fatness, tells us everything we need to know about the distorting mirror through which Anderson reflects the history of empire.
Above all, the colonial order is represented by the film's devious protagonist Anatole 'Zsa-Zsa' Korda and his visionary scheme to build railways, tunnels, canals and dams across Phoenicia. The significance of infrastructure in colonial mythology cannot be overstated. Anderson says Korda was inspired by his father-in-law, the Lebanese construction magnate Fouad Maalouf, also the film's dedicatee. But Korda is as much an empire-builder in the mould of Cecil Rhodes or Ferdinand de Lesseps.
With his African mines and railways, Rhodes brought to heel the better part of a continent. In building the Suez canal, a waterway in the deserted sands between Africa and Asia, De Lesseps performed Moses' miracle in reverse. Such magnificent infrastructure projects, said to be beyond the wit of the native, were the glory of empire and still feature in reappraisals of it ('What about the railways?'). It's in this context that Korda's Phoenician scheme must be understood: a plot to re-engineer the Middle East in his image.
This is the east as a career, in Disraeli's famous words. And through such a career, the Palestinian literary critic Edward Said wrote, 'one could remake and restore not only the Orient but also oneself'. That sums up Korda, who is as motivated by megalomania as money.
There's always been something grippingly cinematic about that. It was another Korda – the Hungarian Jewish émigré film director Zoltan Korda – who more than anyone demonstrated that, in colonial adventure films that he made with his brother Alexander in the 1930s, relating heroic adventures in a timeless orient under eternal British rule. In naming his hero Korda, Anderson proudly acknowledges his debt to a controversial narrative tradition.
In its most pointed contrast with reality, its greatest hallucination about empire, The Phoenician Scheme unfolds in a cosmopolitan world that is, for all its lying and cheating and double-dealing, completely free of racism. Imperial cosmopolitanism is symbolised, of all things, in headwear. The fez is absolutely ubiquitous in the film, as it was among colonial elites, Muslim, Christian and Jewish. (There are photos of Israel's founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, as a fez-hatted law student in Istanbul.) It fell out of fashion in the postcolonial Middle East, becoming a symbol of colonial nostalgia.
Sign up to Film Weekly
Take a front seat at the cinema with our weekly email filled with all the latest news and all the movie action that matters
after newsletter promotion
Anderson positively luxuriates in that nostalgia, in the ecumenical fellowship of the fez, worn in the film by Frenchmen, Arabs, Armenians, all happily sharing cocktails. Korda appears to be Armenian (judging by the script on his birth certificate) but in a bizarre twist Korda dons the distinctive white fez and robes of Lebanon's Druze sect, just as pharaonic imagery strangely adorns Phoenician hotels: all part of the pastiche.
This is history stylised beyond all proportion. It's meant to evoke the urbane world that existed under imperial rule, before the emergence of violent ethno-nationalism. The state of Israel is absent from the film, but Zionism, interestingly, isn't. One corner of Phoenicia, visited by Korda, has a kibbutz, replete with Hebrew signage, quotations from the Old Testament and the suggestive imagery of 'making the desert bloom', palm trees sprouting from the barren earth. It has its own visionary founder, a rival of Korda's, played by Scarlett Johansson, working the land in khaki shorts, like the pioneer kibbutzniks portrayed in early Zionist posters.
Crucially, though, it's labelled a 'private utopian outpost'. Nationalism is such an anathema to the ethos of the film that Zionism is reduced to the personal enterprise of another one of those visionaries making a career in the east. It has no aspirations to statehood. Such nonpolitical strains of Zionism were originally favoured by followers of the movement, including Einstein and Kafka, and one suspects it's the kind most palatable to Anderson. But this sanitised, fantasy vision of Zionism is of a piece with Anderson's fantasy of empire. Historically in both, violence and racism were always simmering.
The Phoenician Scheme may at once be Anderson's worst and most profound film, a beautifully textured engagement with the past, and an almost morally repugnant retreat from the present. Its transformation of tragedy into comedy feels perverse. To watch The Phoenician Scheme amid the devastation of Gaza – during which it was also filmed – is to see two images of history, two maps of our time, disorientingly superimposed over each other: the sweet fantasy of a much-promised land, and the bitter, bloody reality of how it's turning out.

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

Daily Mail​

13 hours ago

• Daily Mail​

BBC scraps plans to show documentary about medics in Gaza after new bias concerns

The BBC has decided to scrap plans to show a documentary about medics in Gaza over concerns it 'risked creating a perception of partiality' of its coverage of the conflict. Gaza: Doctors Under Attack was commissioned by the corporation more than a year ago from an independent production company called Basement Films. However, its production was paused in April after an investigation was launched into the making of another controversial documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone. That programme was taken off the iPlayer earlier this year, and the corporation was forced to apologise after it was revealed that the documentary featured a 13-year-old narrator who is the son of a Hamas government minister and grandson of one of Hamas' s founding members. In the latest controversy over the BBC's coverage of the war, the broadcaster has confirmed discussions over the documentary showing the plight of medics in Gaza had 'reached the end of the road'. The corporation will now transfer ownership of the project to the independent production company that produced it. 'We wanted the doctors' voices to be heard,' the BBC said in a statement. 'Our aim was to find a way to air some of the material in our news programmes, in line with our impartiality standards, before the review was published. 'For some weeks, the BBC has been working with Basement Films to find a way to tell the stories of these doctors on our platforms.' But, the corporation added: 'Yesterday it became apparent that we have reached the end of the road with these discussions. 'We have come to the conclusion that broadcasting this material risked creating a perception of partiality that would not meet the high standards that the public rightly expect of the BBC. 'Impartiality is a core principle of BBC News. It is one of the reasons that we are the world's most trusted broadcaster. 'Therefore, we are transferring ownership of the film material to Basement Films.' It went on to say that since the pause in production of Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, 'it has not undergone the BBC's final pre-broadcast sign-off processes' and 'any film broadcast will not be a BBC film'. Critics were also enraged by the Beeb's failure to disclose who the film's narrator was, leading former director of BBC Television Danny Cohen to say: 'The BBC appears to have given an hour of prime-time coverage to the son of a senior member of the Hamas terrorist group. 'Either they were not aware of the terrorist links because they did not carry out the most basic journalistic checks or the BBC did know and misled audiences about the family's deep involvement with terrorism.' The BBC documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, was broadcast on BBC Two with the aim of showing a 'vivid and unflinching view of life' in the enclave Since the allegations were made, the BBC has apologised and added new text to the film which explains who Abdullah and his father are. In an email exchange via the BBC, Abdullah reportedly said he wanted to be part of the documentary, which was made by Hoyo Films, 'to explain the suffering that people here in Gaza witness with the language that the world understands, English.' He is said to have asked to be involved to help viewers learn about the situation on the ground without being 'blurred by misinformation'. The BBC documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, was broadcast on February 17 on BBC Two with the aim of showing a 'vivid and unflinching view of life' in the strip. It was made by two producers based in London who remotely directed two cameramen on the ground over nine months. Independent investigative journalist David Collier claimed one of the child narrators, Abdullah, is the son of a Hamas government minister and grandson of one of Hamas's founding members. Using Facebook and publicly available data online, Mr Collier claimed the show's young star is the son of Gaza's deputy minister of agriculture Dr Ayman Al-Yazouri. This would mean his grandfather would be the Hamas founder Ibrahim al-Yazouri, who has previously been jailed by Egypt and Israel for involvement in proscribed groups. The Daily Mail has not been able to independently verify Mr Collier's claims. The BBC apologised for the inclusion of the documentary's young star, with a spokesperson for the corporation saying: 'Since the transmission of our documentary on Gaza, the BBC has become aware of the family connections of the film's narrator, a child called Abdullah. 'We've promised our audiences the highest standards of transparency, so it is only right that as a result of this new information, we add some more detail to the film before its retransmission. We apologise for the omission of that detail from the original film.' The BBC said the new text attached to the film: 'The narrator of this film is 13 year old Abdullah. His father has worked as a deputy agriculture minister for the Hamas-run government in Gaza. The production team had full editorial control of filming with Abdullah.' 'We followed all of our usual compliance procedures in the making of this film, but we had not been informed of this information by the independent producers when we complied and then broadcast the finished film,' the statement added. 'The film remains a powerful child's eye view of the devastating consequences of the war in Gaza which we believe is an invaluable testament to their experiences, and we must meet our commitment to transparency.'

Daily Mail​

14 hours ago

• Daily Mail​

MARK HALPERIN: Netanyahu has seduced Trump by exploiting his biggest weakness... but here's what will derail the leaders' bromance

Let us now praise famous men — and the famously transactional friendships they foster. Benjamin 'Bibi' Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel and amongst the world's longest-running acts in the global political circus, has always possessed a singular talent: the ability to both infuriate and seduce American presidents, often simultaneously.

Times

15 hours ago

• Times

Naga Munchetty faces bullying claims as BBC Breakfast unrest grows

BBC Breakfast began as usual at 6am on Friday morning with presenters Charlie Stayt and Naga Munchetty introducing the programme with headlines about the assisted dying bill, tension in the Middle East and soaring British temperatures. But less than two hours later a Radio 2 breakfast show news bulletin shed light on the chaotic backdrop that has engulfed its sister show in Salford. The newsreader Tina Daheley told listeners that Richard Frediani, the BBC Breakfast editor, had taken an 'extended period of leave' after allegations about his behaviour in the workplace. However, Daheley, known to be among the presenters who have clashed with Frediani after her photograph was omitted from a press release about the News at One bulletin he also edits, did not mention allegations about Munchetty that were reported overnight.