This moment from The Phoenician Scheme might be one of the film’s most revealing insights into Zsa-Zsa’s psychology and the hollowness behind his carefully curated persona.
Here we see him say, “I don’t have a passport. I don’t live anywhere. I’m not a citizen at all.” What he’s describing isn’t liberation, but erasure. His wealth and sophistication have become armor, sealing him off from any true sense of belonging. The plane’s confined space, drifting through clouds and detached from any visible landscape, mirrors his own rootlessness.
When he concludes, “I don’t need my human rights,” it’s not bravado but delusion. Zsa Zsa has spent so long chasing status and accumulation that he’s traded away his humanity. Even his palatial home, seen earlier in the film, is cold and impersonal. In fact, it is more museum than refuge. In that sense, the scene is quintessential Wes Anderson: darkly funny yet deeply tragic. Zsa-Zsa Korda is a man who has achieved everything, only to become untethered from the very world that once defined him.
