Licorice Pizza and the Age of Innocence by Paul Thomas Anderson

There is a lot of racing in this new movie Paul Thomas Anderson, Licorice Pizza, finally in theaters. She runs leaving behind the police and nasty stories of arrests, she runs to have fun, she runs to hug, she runs in the car to get out of trouble. She also runs on the notes of Life On Mars by David Bowie. We run with that lightness and that smile of the youth which is one of the main themes of the film.

Licorice Pizza it’s a movie whimsical and apparently frayed. Soaked in that nostalgia reminiscent of the atmospheres of Once upon a time … in Hollywood by Tarantino: the title comes from a now defunct chain of Los Angeles record stores, the story is set in the San Fernando Valley Some years seventy, in an analog world very far from today. Film by training (today we would say “coming-of-age”), but above all love story unusual between an enterprising 15-year-old boy and a bored 25-year-old who works as an assistant to the photographer in charge of portraying the boys for the school yearbook.

In the shoes of the two protagonists there are two rookies that Paul Thomas Anderson turns into stars. Cooper Hoffmanson of the deceased Philip Seymour Hoffmanperfectly embodies the teenager Gary Valentine, a lot of chatter and little experience, a child actor now in decline due to his age, who with a very American entrepreneurial spirit throws himself into the waterbed business. Alana Haimfrom the pop band Haim – of which Anderson has directed some video clips – is very at ease in the role of the restless Alana Kane, a young woman who remembers Barbra Streisand for beauty and personality: the combination is insistently suggested also by the fact that it also enters the story at a certain point Jon Petersthe crazy boyfriend of Barbra Streisand, the one who financed A star was bornplayed here by Bradley Cooper (creator of the remake of the film with Lady Gaga: the references are double).

This love story is reminiscent in some ways Harold and Maude, Hal Ashby’s 1971 film that chronicled the sentimental bond between a young boy and an elderly lady. Here the age difference is smaller – about ten years – but on paper it is almost as impossible a love. Alana constantly wonders if it is right to go out with a fifteen-year-old boy and her friends of hers with pimples, while between the two little big ones snap jealousies, which are in fact the heart of the plot. She befriends another child actor, he hits on a peer, she flirts with movie star Jack Holden (a fantastic Sean Penn), probably inspired by the figure of William Holden, then with the candidate for mayor of the city. Small episodes that take us up and down Los Angeles, between hilarious characters such as the owner of the first Japanese restaurant in the city who does not know Japanese, and potentially explosive situations, such as Bradley Cooper’s hysterical scene. He floats with great pleasure, like on a waterbed, savoring scene after scene, beat by beat, the joy to be young And lovers in a perpetually sunny city that only exists in the past, like the Licorice Pizza shops.