Wes Anderson’s latest film – The Phoenician Scheme – has caused as much confusion amongst critics and viewers as it has the usual delight. It tells the story of Anatole – Zsa-Zsa – Korda, his mad-cap business scheme across an imagined near-Eastern world, and his growing relationship with his daughter (apparently), Liesl, a novitiate nun. There are the usual Anderson-ian tropes and characters, with superb cameos by Tom Hanks, Richard Ayoade, and Benedict Cumberbatch (worth watching in itself), and a real star turn for the young Liesl, Mia Threapleton.
I first watched it on a transatlantic flight (viewer advisory: there are several scenes in rickety planes). I was hooked from the first moment. Why? Not just the usual Anderson style and panache and dead-pan weird story and acting. It was the music. Anderson himself first trained as a musician. It shouldn’t be a surprise that amidst the rest of Anderson’s meticulously designed and curated world the music should carry so much meaning.
The opening scene (no spoiler, it’s in the trailer), involves the burning wreckage of a plane (viewer advisory). There are birds – crows, hovering. And from the wreckage, bloodied but unbowed, emerges Korda. We hear from a voiceover that this is by no means the first assassination attempt he has survived. It won’t be his last. But the music at this precise point? It is a dark and brooding short melodic fragment. Does this portray a dark and brooding – evil, even – presence in the main character? Indeed, this dark melodic fragment follows Korda around the whole film, a leitmotif.
But far from it. And this is what delighted me and hooked me. Because this isn’t just any old dark and brooding melodic fragment. It is the opening notes of Stravinsky’s magnificent ballet score, his first hit for the Russian impresario in Paris, Diaghilev and his ‘Ballets Russes’, The Firebird. Now here’s the fun thing. If you know the ballet, you know that it is the magic of the firebird’s feather which brings new life out of death in the ballet’s wonderful conclusion. And that is because the Firebird story itself is based on another mythical bird-creature – the phoenix (remember the title of the movie). The mythical phoenix is a bird which cyclically dies in flames, only to be reborn from the ashes to new life. So immediately, even though all we can see is the burnt-out wreckage of a plane, what we might think to ourselves if we know our Stravinsky, is that perhaps what this melodic fragment signifies, far from a brooding menacing presence, is someone who is constantly going to reemerge from the ashes to new life. In fact, I immediately felt I would be surprised if that wouldn’t happen. Korda himself says at a certain point ‘I won’t die, I never do’. Just from a musical fragment, the whole story can be seen in one glimpse.
There are two other Stravinsky ballets which Anderson skilfully deploys (although less intrusively than the Firebird theme): the joyous whirligig of the opening of Petrushka, and the searing epilogue of the ballet Apollo. Now the Petrushka music does seem to be associated with another character, just like Firebird is associated with Korda. In the movie, Petrushka appears in two moments of significance for Liesl, (apparently) Korda’s daughter, the novitiate nun (and therefore herself already intimately associated with music – The Sound of Music). But the telling thing here is that, unlike Firebird, Petrushka (the ballet) doesn’t end well for its eponymous puppet-hero. Petrushka is killed by another puppet, with only a fleeting appearance at the end as a ghost. So the music of the ballet of Petrushka, despite the excerpt we hear being full of joyousness and innocent youthful energy, and its association with Liesl, suggests that her journey in the film is going to go in a very different direction to the convent of her initial intentions. Once again, knowing the music and the whole pattern of it can foretell an entire history that will unfold, even just from a mere fragment.
Now the next thing that is so fascinating here is the combination of Stravinsky and Wes Anderson. Stravinsky wrote several ballet scores for the ‘Ballet Russes’ and Diaghilev in the glamour of Paris of the 1920s and 1930s (amongst other famous ones are The Rite of Spring (which caused a riot), Orpheus, and Pulcinella). They are highly stylised pieces, often returning to Classical ideas and tropes (musically, as well as in theme), presenting stylised and formal dances, tableaux. And whilst all these descriptions could be applied to Anderson’s films, The Phoenician Scheme itself presents a series of quirkily introduced tableaux, with their own distinctive characters and settings. And, in the concluding scene, set in a theatre, all the characters are present all at once. A miniature mechanical device representing all of Korda’s business interests appears on a stage. And the music at that point? The opening movement of Pictures at an Exhibition (by Mussorgsky, a Russian composer from the generation before Stravinsky), music which presents its own series of musical tableaux. Artistic tableau, musical tableau, ballet, and now film presented as a series of tableaux all coming together in Anderson’s fertile imagination.
But there is one last thing that is fascinating for us in this presentation of music and art and film and plot. There is a much earlier precursor for the technique I referred to above, of one musical fragment potentially carrying with it the implication and meaning of the whole work. That earlier precursor for this technique is found in the New Testament. The authors of the New Testament, especially Paul, were saturated in the texts which we now call the Old Testament, or what they thought of as their Scriptures (just as, we might say, Anderson is clearly saturated in Stravinsky). Scholars think the New Testament writers assumed a familiarity with those Scriptures in the hearers and readers of their new writings, or, alternatively, they were helping their hearers and readers newly think and imagine along the lines set out in the Scriptures. Time and again, as Richard Hays masterfully showed (in Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, and Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels), the authors resort to a technique called metalepsis. That is, in quoting or near quoting a few words or a phrase from their Scriptures, not only are the hearers/readers meant to understand that it is a quotation, but to import the sense of the entire passage or even book from which that miniature quotation emerges. It was Richard Hays’s groundbreaking work on this literary hermeneutical aspect which caused a sensation in New Testament studies in the 1980s and 1990s when it first emerged, because it opened up whole new lines of interpretation, without any question remaining about their veracity. What it means is that, as we read the New Testament, we have constantly to be aware of what Scriptures the writer had in mind, either consciously or semi-consciously, in order to allow that thought-world to permeate our reading. It is a reminder, whatever we are reading or watching or listening to, never to be too reductive about our own cultural horizons when we approach such a text, but to be listening and open and willing to be enlarged by the life-world of the text before us, as the great philosopher Paul Ricoeur used to say.
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