At the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, "The Phoenician Scheme," Wes Anderson's humane puzzle film

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For almost thirty years now, we have been receiving, post office on the web, the eccentric messages, redolent of distress, from the young Wes Anderson, 56 years old on May 1st. An American dandy who has long been a refugee in France and England, something in the work of this master of zany adventure and vintage design suggests that he has narrowly escaped some ineffable family romance.

The family, in fact, whether natural or blended, biological or friendly, is the elective Andersonian subject. Dysfunctional by nature, often in an Oedipal triangulation, bizarre in its developments, and ultimately supremely endearing. The mental chaos and absurdity of the resulting situations are curbed by a rigorous ordering of the form that contains them. From there, to imagine a Wes Anderson who has become a filmmaker precisely to frame the secret madness that haunts him, that is a basic Freudian hypothesis on which no one is obliged to bet a kopeck.

In any case, Anderson frames, arranges, classifies, symmetrizes, models, automates, lists, colors, puts on a line and fixes at right angles a world that is a little too shaky for his taste. Frames, boxes, maps, lists, compasses, manuals, signs, diagrams, instructions, old typographies, sets, chapters, everything is good for the rigorous ordering of things. All that remains is to name them, Anderson touching on genius in this matter: The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) , The Life Aquatic (2004) , The Darjeeling Limited (2007) , Moonrise Kingdom (2012) , The French Dispatch (2021) . Who wouldn't run to take a closer look?

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