The beauty of Licorice Pizza (2021) by Paul Thomas Anderson , everyone can look for wherever they want. In the scenography that gives us back the streets, the rooms with pinball machines, the clothes, the interiors of the offices (the minimal ones in which an election campaign is set up for a councilor who aspires to mayor), the kitchens and the bedrooms of the popular apartments of the middle -class of the Seventies, of a provincial America. With the help, of course, of the digital which in the “reconstructions” offers us, shocking us, the absolute “true historian”.
Or, in the splendid acting of Alana Haim (the 25-year-old dreamer, Alana Kane: surname-homage to Orson Welles
) in love but discreet, super decisive in the twists and turns of life (see how she drives a track in reverse, a la Steven Spielberg !). Actorial performance that is reflected in the other surprising performance of the supporting actor, Cooper Hoffman (in fiction, the fifteen-year-old Gary Valentine, struck by that “older” girl) skilled in transforming his physique into flesh, initially clumsy, in plastic movements, perhaps cubists, even handsome (that nineteen-year-old Cooper, let’s not forget, and the son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman , Drunk with love, 2002, PT Anderson).
Or, perhaps, in the ability to outline, with two touches, the post-sixty-eight generational crisis, father-son tensions and the cooling of faith in rituals, avoiding pistolotti and unnecessarily hysterical-dramatic scenes.
But the director Paul Thomas Anderson, as well as catching us for his direction deliberately full of sequence shots (it will be studied, and how !, in film schools), like the incipitous one with Gary who follows Alana, towing her, in the high school where she he works, he surprises us for something else: for his story-not-story. In the sense that we try to guess how the story proceeds, but we are continually displaced by it. A screenplay that introduces slight progressive shifts, Robbegrillettian, of the “pleasure of the text”, canceling the mental traces of those sitting in the room. Who tries to figure out where he wants to parry this story of two boys who meet and then life separates them momentarily and, again, here they are reunited by the micro-events of a provincial town, San Fernando. Among unpredictable and sociologically forgotten situations and figures from history books: here we refer to the problem of gay love to be faced with difficulty in a small community; the part of an old star jumping on a motorcycle (and the part ofSean Penn ) in those nocturnal races, lit up by bonfires, a la James Dean ; further on, the sale, at home, of revolutionary water mattresses; not to mention the lines of cars blocked along the roads, running out of fuel, due to the war and the oil crisis (what is current: here another trolley and a clear homage to Jean-Luc Godard of Weekend, 1967). Sure, George Lucas
‘ American Graffiti (1973) comes to mindand Licorice Pizza is no exception in telling the small-large anonymous American province. We were there at the end of high school, in the sixties. Here we are out of high school, in life, in the seventies, with the Vietnam war that comes muffled, in bars, as background noise, from color TV and from newspapers. Licorice Pizza (title due to the vinyl chain of the seventies) will enter the top 100 of films loved by sociologists, also thanks to the music of Sonny Rollins , Cher , Donovan.
You can find the delicacy of Paul Thomas Anderson simply when he makes you relive, as a European, those years in an American town as if it were your city, your country. Without easy tears or sloppiness. Without upholstery nudes or useless erotic gym scenes. The poetry of Licorice Pizza, an Oscar-winning film, is all in that first adolescent kiss, Rohmerian, delicate, like the breath of a spring zephyr, between a twenty-five and a sixteen year old, decidedly more mature than her age, to gain the trust of a girl different from the others.
