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Wes Anderson Explains the Darkness at the Heart of His Films
Even as his style has become even more ornate, the subjects he’s been tackling feel increasingly political. See: his latest, The Phoenician Scheme.
The more sinister and complicated aspects of Zsa-Zsa’s character — his greed, his chicanery, his vindictiveness, his paranoia, his disregard of his family, his cavalier attitude toward paying people and the suffering of others— came from a variety of other 20th-century business figures, including the notorious shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis; the film producer Carlo Ponti; the Hungarian banker Árpád Plesch; and the Armenian fixer Calouste Gulbenkian, the infamous middleman known as “Mr. One of the pleasures of watching Anderson’s films over the years is that he and his work have grown up before our eyes, moving from the precocious coming-of-age stories of his early career — where even the older characters’ stirrings of mortalityfelt like the vague ruminations of a thoughtful and earnest young man projecting himself into the future — to the more pensive later efforts, which are steeped in regret and a paradoxical embrace of the enigmatic nature of life. In each of these episodes, characters long to break free of their realities without ever quite knowing how: an imprisoned mentally ill artist in love; French students rebelling against a system that predetermines their fate; and a gay African American writer (modeled partly after James Baldwin) living in self-exile in France who pours all his emotions into impeccably crafted articles about food.
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