The Phoenician Scheme | Ballerina
Baroque schemes, backstabbing...and their consequences.
Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro) is a businessman with a long string of shady deals and a habit of surviving assassination attempts. The attempts on his life stack up alongside his accomplishments like marks in a ledger; sooner or later, his luck and his money are both going to run out. Any good will toward him has already run thin. He’s ruthless, willing to exploit desperate workers for cheap labor and unaffected by the poverty he leaves in his wake. He has precious few allies aside from his recently unestranged daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton), a postulant nun about to take her vows. Together, the bad man and his pious daughter set out to resolve a hiccup in his latest business scheme. The scenario has a lovely symmetry to it, befitting Wes Anderson’s aesthetic and thematic interests.
Anderson’s carefully constructed worlds, locked off and lovely, are the perfect settings to explore the nature of truth, of artifice, and of artifice in storytelling. When everything looks like a stage play, we’re free to imagine the realities that underlie the unreal environments. Zsa-zsa is a storyteller of the most devious kind, a man who must against all odds convince other people that they’re better off spending their own money for his interests. At the moment, his biggest interest is resolving an unforeseen gap in the budget of a massive business deal that will unite Phoenicia’s four corners and at the same time impoverish its citizens. He, with Liesl in tow, intends to cover the otherwise insurmountable gap in the budget by convincing his business partners to take on the additional expense.
Every time Zsa-zsa meets with another partner, he claims the meeting is “a symbolic meeting, a formality.” He’s lying through his teeth: the project will ruin him without their intervention, and their additional funds would help him stave off ruination (and possibly any additional assassination attempts). All the while, his daughter watches—and prays. She is suspicious of his motives and misses the church; for his part, he’s skeptical of religion, though he keeps finding additional reasons, against his will, to loosen his grip on his agnosticism, inch by inch.
Anderson finds increasingly startling images to express Zsa-zsa’s crisis of doubt: a stag, cut open to reveal not blood but a flood of gold coins; a child gasping in a coffin; a moment where God himself blinks in bemusement at one of his children. Zsa-zsa is knocked sideways by these visions, and the more off-kilter he gets, the closer he comes to repairing his relationship with his daughter. He gives Liesl, who has picked up the habit of smoking, a corncob pipe studded with precious gems. It’s an act of gilding the lily, but he is good at it—it’s what drives his business deals, and it gets at the contradiction at the heart of Zsa-zsa’s relationship with his daughter. He’s a silver-tongued schemer who may live or die by the power of his own improvised words; she’s a nearly-silent nun who’s dedicated her life to sincere faith and prayer, something Zsa-zsa doesn’t understand but wants for himself. When he asks her about it, she tells him, “It’s not witchcraft. The phrasing of it, which I don’t recall, doesn’t matter—what matters is the sincerity of your devotion.”
Her sincere belief can—and does—change the world. Zsa-zsa himself is proof that insincerity can do the same: every single one of his accomplishments has been completed with the threat of violence, but violence begets violence, and he’s getting tired of the fear of being consumed by the consequences of his own appetites.
“This gap,” says Zsa-zsa, “might be bottomless—more like an abyss.” He can’t cover it, can’t reconcile it; the debts are too great. Relinquishing his scheme would mean the end of Zsa-zsa’s world as he knows it. Anderson’s film has the symmetrical design intrinsic to all his best movies—the clean lines, the clever asides—but it also has a symmetry in its plot, with a character arc both inevitable and surprising: the capacity for grace toward a hard man, and perhaps the hope of the slow work of redemption and mercy by inches.—Sarah Welch-Larson
★★★★
The Phoenician Scheme is expanded release now.
The John Wick movies have always been about stunt work, which is to say that they have always been about physical action and the toll it takes on the human body. From the World of John Wick: Ballerina has an early sequence that replicates, nearly shot-for-shot, a scene in John Wick: Chapter 3–Parabellum in which a ballerina pirouettes on stage. The camera focuses on her back muscles as she spins, then reveals her pointe shoes dripping blood, a testament to the toll that her art exacts on her body. Parabellum uses the scene to hint about the larger world that John Wick (Keanu Reeves) inhabits, the kind of detail that makes the John Wick universe fun to watch. Ballerina piles on plenty of detail, but forgets to have fun with it.
Eve (Ana de Armas) is the titular ballerina, a dancer whose training includes the skills necessary to be an assassin in the Ruska Roma crime family. She’s bent on revenge for the death of her father, who was killed by another assassin clan when she was just a child. Ballerina assumes that the viewer is familiar with the lore of the previous John Wick movies, but the bones of the plot are relatively generic, the kind of revenge tale that’s uninterested in the motivation driving the need for revenge. If not for the occasional gold coin and neon lighting, it would be difficult to remember that we’re watching a John Wick spinoff. Ballerina shows no curiosity about the details that set this world apart.
The movie doesn’t really know what to do with its central character, either. She is noticeably smaller than most of her opponents, a fact that her trainer Nogi (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) points out to her, telling her that she’s at a clear disadvantage. “Change the terms” of the fight, Nogi coaches, adding, “Fight like a girl.” Eve immediately switches up her fighting style to be more brutal. She’s young and inexperienced; she makes mistakes. The battles she fights are all stacked against her, forcing her to think laterally. They also seem more than a little perfunctory. Eve’s training as a ballerina doesn’t really inform her ability to fight; it’s another backstory detail that’s almost immediately forgotten.
Nor is the script able to effectively communicate what the movie is actually about. The script throws reams of dialogue at the wall to see if anything will stick: lines about fate, choice, family, and fealty, none of it unified, none of it serving to explore anything deeper—not even the fights that the movie exists to present. A significant portion of the plot centers on Eve fighting her way through a ski village full of people trying to kill her. The setting is one of the most interesting parts of the movie, a scenario that raises further questions about Eve’s world. But the script doesn’t care about why any of these assassins exist. It simply needed an excuse for Eve to cut her way through ranks of faceless goons. She doesn’t need the excuse, and the fact that the movie doesn’t bother to dig in to the questions it raises comes across as patronizing and messy, a thrown punch that fails to follow through.—Sarah Welch-Larson
★☆☆☆
Ballerina is in theaters now.