Licorice Pizza: Paul Thomas Anderson's Most Accessible and Luminous Work (review)

Licorice Pizza: Paul Thomas Anderson’s most accessible and luminous work (review)

The filmmaker tells an intoxicating romance in 1973 California.

France 4 will rebroadcast this Saturday, in the first part of the evening this time, Licorice Pizzathe latest film from Paul Thomas Anderson. A work that had a big impact on Première when it was released in early 2022.

Here is our review, interspersed with the first information on the American filmmaker’s next film, which he has just released film with Leonardo DiCaprio. Note that Licorice Pizza is also visible for free in replay on France.TV.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s film starring Leonardo DiCaprio has a release date

The 70s, the San Fernando Valley, boy meets girl… Wouldn’t Paul Thomas Anderson have already made this film? With Licorice Pizzathe director is very clearly back on the land of Boogie Nights, Magnolia And Punch-Drunk Loveits “San Fernando Valley Trilogy”named after this gigantic suburb of Los Angeles where he grew up, separated from the rest of the city by the Hollywood Hills. PTA returns to its first loves, therefore, after having traveled extensively in time and space, from California at the beginning of the 20th century (There Will Be Blood) in London fashion in the 1950s (Phantom Thread), through traumatized post-World War II America (The Master) and the smashed one from after 68 (Inherent Vice). Long aesthetic journey during which he definitively got rid of the overwhelming influence of his masters (Altman, Kubrick, Scorsese) and established himself as one of the great sphynxes of contemporary US cinema. The first beauty of Licorice Pizza is to see him return to the world of his youth, of his apprenticeship, rich in the stylistic height of view that is now his, and freed from what weighed down his first feature films, this desire to flex his muscles, to show his strength. This ninth opus proclaims the desire to be like a first film, like a first time, a new work of youth, since its argument (a romance a bit weirdo which begins in high school, on class photo day) to its (fabulous) duo of beginners headlining: Alana Haim, a musician whom PTA had already directed in music videos but who had never acted. , and Cooper Hoffman, son of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who makes his screen debut.

Licorice Pizza will therefore be a film of pure pleasure, far from the sometimes intimidating metaphysical puzzles of which its author had ended up making a specialty, a seventies stroll giving the impression of having been filmed with his hands in his pockets, a dreamy smile on his lips . The argument? Boy meets girl. He, Gary Valentine, is a teenage actor, smooth talker, a bit of a showoff. She, Alana Kane, in her twenties, is a little too old for him, but will fall under the spell of his chatter, while taking great pleasure in standing up to him. What follows are adventures that are both anecdotal and totally Homeric, derisory and grandiose – like almost everything that happens at those ages. Gary goes into the waterbed business, a booming business in patchouli-scented LA, then tries to help Alana break into the film business, before the two end up working for the campaign election of a candidate for mayor of Los Angeles. Is that all? Oh, yes: Gary is also going to open a pinball room. And California will bear the brunt of the effects of the first oil shock. We will recognize in the apparently headless unfolding of this story Anderson’s taste for a form of light surrealism, the absurd poetry of a stoner and a Pynchon admirer, who connects bizarre situations like we go from rooster to rooster. ‘donkey. Licorice Pizza obeys a childish logic and takes place in a world in which adults are almost absent – ​​a bit as if Peter Pan’s Neverland had been relocated to the suburbs of Hollywood. And when the old people come on the scene, they are generally shown as buffoonish figures, or bigger than lifeunreal in any case – extraordinary appearances by Sean Penn, Tom Waits and Bradley Cooper as show-biz fossils. It is a world where whizz-kidssmarter than average kids, make the law and invent their own rules. Alana and Gary will take turns trying their hand at free enterprise,entertainment and politics: a sort of trilogy of the great American occupations, Californian promises, but seen here as passing affairs, simple entertainment teenage. As if the American dream, the one after which most of the PTA characters chase until they go crazy, was basically just a game.

Reconstructing here the landscape of his childhood (he was three years old in 1973), directing the son of his deceased favorite actor, inviting his own children and his wife Maya Rudolph to the screen, multiplying the nods to Hollywood dynasties (appearances of Spielberg’s daughter and Leonardo DiCaprio’s dad!), Paul Thomas Anderson does not necessarily sign his Once upon a time… in Hollywood. The secret key to Licorice Pizza is perhaps biographical, intimate, but the film is much less burdened by the melancholy of a vanished world than Tarantino’s. On the contrary: he seems filled with the simple joy of being able to piece it together, then explore it at leisure. The cultural references, above all, are much less overbearing than at QT. There are certainly plenty of winks here for pop encyclopedists, memorabilia galore, cinema marquees announcing the latest James Bond… We will undoubtedly appreciate the film even more if we recognize Jon Peters (producer, hairstylist to the stars and ex-husband of Barbra Streisand) behind Bradley Cooper’s outfit, if we look at the character played by Sean Penn as a distorting mirror of William Holden, or if we’ve ever heard of Lucille Ball or the politician Joel Wachs. But everything is done in such a relaxed manner that the pleasure is never parasitized by the avalanche of quotations. Like this title, Licorice Pizza. Originally, it designates a chain of record stores from the 70s and 80s, in which we imagine that PTA went to shop when he was a teenager. But we don’t come across a single one of these glorious shops in the film. There “liquorice pizza” is not a brand, not a code name for happy fewbut a state of mind. It refers to the unreal world of memories, this feeling that anything can happen and that summer might never end. An adolescent belief that few films have captured as gloriously as this one.

By Paul Thomas Anderson. With Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, Sean Penn… Duration 2h13. Released January 5, 2022

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