Licorice Pizza: Paul Thomas Anderson's Most Accessible and Luminous Work [critique]

The filmmaker tells a heady romance in 1973 California.

France 2 will broadcast this evening, for the first time on French television (but in the second part of the evening) Licorice Pizzathe latest film by Paul Thomas Anderson. A work that left a big impression 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. filming with Leonardo DiCaprio. Note that Licorice Pizza will also be visible for free. in replay on France.TV throughout the week.

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

The 70s, the San Fernando Valley, a boy meets a girl… Didn’t Paul Thomas Anderson already make this movie? With Licorice Pizzathe director is very clearly back on the land of Boogie Nights, Magnolia And Punch-Drunk Lovehis “San Fernando Valley trilogy,” named after the gigantic suburb of Los Angeles where he grew up, separated from the rest of the city by the Hollywood Hills. PTA returns to his first love, therefore, after having traveled extensively in time and space, from early 20th century California (There Will Be Blood) in London fashion of the fifties (Phantom Thread), through traumatized post-World War II America (The Master) and the broken one from after 68 (Inherent Vice). Long aesthetic journey during which he will have definitively freed himself from the overwhelming influence of his masters (Altman, Kubrick, Scorsese) and established himself as one of the great sphinxes 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, from its plot (a romance a little weirdo which begins in high school, on class picture day) to its (fabulous) duo of newbies at the top of the bill: 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 is making his screen debut.

Licorice Pizza will therefore be a film of pure pleasure, far from the sometimes intimidating metaphysical puzzles that its author had ended up making a specialty of, a seventies ballad 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 show-off. She, Alana Kane, in her twenties, is a bit too old for him, but will fall under the spell of his gift of the gab, while taking a mischievous pleasure in standing up to him. Adventures follow that are both anecdotal and totally Homeric, ridiculous and grandiose – like pretty much everything that happens at that age. Gary starts selling waterbeds, a booming business in an LA still perfumed with patchouli, then tries to help Alana break into the movie business, before the two end up working for the election campaign of a candidate for mayor of Los Angeles. Is that all? Oh, yes: Gary is also going to open a pinball room. And California is going to be hit hard by the effects of the first oil crisis. In the apparently nonsensical unfolding of this story, we will recognize Anderson's taste for a form of light surrealism, the absurd poetry of a pot smoker and Pynchon admirer, who strings together bizarre situations as if jumping from one thing to another. Licorice Pizza obeys a childish logic and takes place in a world where adults are almost absent – a bit like if Peter Pan's Neverland had been relocated to the suburbs of Hollywood. And when the old people enter the scene, they are generally shown as buffoonish figures, or bigger than lifeunreal in all cases – extraordinary appearances by Sean Penn, Tom Waits and Bradley Cooper as show-biz fossils. It is a world where whizz-kidsthe smarter-than-average kids, make the law and invent their own rules. Alana and Gary will try their hand at free enterprise,entertainment and politics: a sort of trilogy of the great American occupations, of Californian promises, but seen here as flings, simple entertainments teenage. As if the American dream, the one that most of the characters in PTA chase until they go crazy, was ultimately 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 on screen, multiplying the winks to Hollywood dynasties (appearances by Spielberg's daughter and Leonardo DiCaprio's father!), Paul Thomas Anderson does not necessarily sign here his Once upon a time… in Hollywood. The secret key of Licorice Pizza may be biographical, intimate, but the film is much less burdened by the melancholy of a vanished world than Tarantino. On the contrary: it seems filled with the simple joy of being able to reconstruct it, then explore it at leisure. The cultural references, above all, are much less overbearing than in QT. There are certainly plenty of winks here for pop encyclopedists, memorabilia galore, cinematic marquees announcing the last James Bond… We will probably appreciate the film even more if we recognize Jon Peters (producer, hairdresser to the stars and ex-husband of Barbra Streisand) behind Bradley Cooper's outfit, if we see Sean Penn's character as a distorting mirror of William Holden, or if we have already heard of Lucille Ball or the politician Joel Wachs. But everything is done in such a relaxed way that the pleasure is never spoiled by the avalanche of citations. Like this title, Licorice Pizza. Originally, it refers to a chain of record stores from the 70s and 80s, where we imagine PTA would have gone shopping when he was a teenager. But we don't come across a single one of these glorious shops in the film. “Licorice pizza” is not a brand, not a code name for happy fewbut a state of mind. It refers to the unreal world of memories, that feeling that anything could 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 on January 5, 2022

Paul Thomas Anderson Doesn't Care If His Movies Are Streamed