For film hangers as a ‘bigger than life’ celebration.
Direction: Paul Thomas Anderson Distribution: Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Bradley Cooper, Ben Safdie, Maya Rudolph, Joseph Cross Original title: Licorice Pizza Country: USA Year: 2021 Release date: 11–02-2022 Gender: Drama Script: Paul Thomas Anderson Photography: Paul Thomas AndersonMichael Bauman Synopsis: The film is set in California in 1973 and tells the story of Alana Kane and Gary Valantine, two young people who meet, grow up together and fall in love.
There is a tendency to associate each film released by Paul Thomas Anderson with a festive indigestion, a sensory drunkenness of ideas and images with its corresponding hangover ad infinitum. It is not so misguided if we talk about a guy capable of fusing background and form in the same way as the emotions of the person who shows and who tastes or interprets, that is, author and spectator, as if his works ended up touched by that gift of drunkenness to which the poet Claudio Rodríguez referred. It is just what happens in his lighter and more accessible film, perhaps also freer and rounder, from intoxicated with love (2002), this virtuous plunge into the San Fernando Valley of the 1970s that recounts the unlikely push and pull of love between two creatures captivated by life and desire: Cooper Hoffman, son of the protagonist of Cloak (B. Miller, 2005), and a superb, dazzling Alana Haim, both born for their characters.
Fetishism, tenderness and enjoyment
More than mythomaniac or nostalgic, Licorice Pizza is a fetishistic film, obsessive to the point of disorder when it comes to capturing the essence of an era with splendid photographic work by the director and Michael Bauman, a collection of luminous vignettes saturated with cameos, nudges at self-righteous new sensibilities (John Michael Higgins’ character), a play list formidable and a cataract of winks, explicit or buried (James Bond, Barbra Streisand, William Holden, LoveStory...) on an epidermal mat that works as a sounding board, a sticker album and an atlas of sentimental geography. Director of Magnolia (1999) uses the coming of age in a sui generis declension, integrating itself into a genuinely americanwhich goes from Scott Fitzgerald (this side of paradise) to Rick Moody and Jonathan Franzen via Philip Roth. But above all, Licorice Pizza triumphs as very humane and pays homage to a lost cinema, perhaps impossible in the current context: that of authors such as Mike Nichols, Robert Altman, Robert Mulligan, Paul Mazursky or Hal Ashby, to whom Anderson pays effervescent homage. It would be great if its mere existence could make the elusive new generations immerse themselves in forgotten titles like Flying is for the birds (R. Altman, 1970) or Next stop, Greenwich Village (P. Mazursky, 1976). In the end it will turn out that postmodernity had a heart.
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Source: Fotogramas
Camila Luna is a writer at Gossipify, where she covers the latest movies and television series. With a passion for all things entertainment, Camila brings her unique perspective to her writing and offers readers an inside look at the industry. Camila is a graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a degree in English and is also a avid movie watcher.
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