THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – MASTERPIECE
What has never been said, shown or told about teenage love affairs, so that a new film on the subject does not immediately appear completely drained? If the ninth feature film by American Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood, 2007; Phantom Thread, 2017) yet renews the genre beyond all expectations, it is not so much by the originality of what it tells: a boy and a girl like each other, turn around and end up kissing – the usual routine . It is rather for having seen through adolescence, which always reiterates the same reasons (passage and initiation), a stronger stake: the incarnation of a youth likely to transcend eras and to regenerate the cinema in itself. same. And, in fact, rarely recent American cinema, haunted by the specter of its own decline, had it shown such a capacity for euphoria as in this lively and twirling film.
This exhilaration is in Los Angeles from the early 1970s that Licorice Pizza is going to look for it and from which he draws, by the way, his fetish title of “Liquorice pizza”, according to the sign of a former chain of record stores in Southern California. More precisely, the story is located in the San Fernando Valley, a sort of village in the city, where the author, born in 1970, grew up, and which he recalls in a retrospective gesture, not without evoking that of Quentin Tarantino with the recent Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019).
Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman), a high school student and child actor with a handful of blockbuster movie appearances, uses his poise to invite the school photographer’s assistant, Alana Kane (Alana Haim), to dinner at the strong character. He is 15 years old, she is 25, but both share the same adolescent territory: he seeks to precede her with an unfailing entrepreneurial spirit; she, who still lives with her parents (traditional Jews), dabbling there more than reason, as in a bath already too long. Without quite knowing why, Alana starts hanging out with this endearing kid, who manages his acting career along with other businesses, and starts with him in the sale of waterbeds. And if she refuses to go out with him, in spite of everything, something makes its way between them, according to their encounters and adventures, in a city teeming with possibilities.
Constant fascination
The stroke of genius Licorice Pizza begins as soon as it is cast. Anderson entrusts the two main roles to beginners, unknown to the general public: Cooper Hoffman, son of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman (1967-2014), and Alana Haim, singer and musician of the neo-folk group Haim, formed with her sisters, whose the filmmaker directed most of the clips. Through them, he relies on atypical physiognomies, resolutely unformatted, the irregularity of which contains in itself all the fragility and the firstness of adolescence, an ungrateful and glorious age at the same time. Successful bet. Both are a constant source of fascination for the camera. Anderson captures the tiniest variations on faces and, in these, the birth and efflorescence of emotions. Thus, the filmmaker (credited with Michael Bauman as cinematographer) does the work of a painter, using his entire palette to better cover the expressive spectrum of his two models.
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