The brash proposal of a fifteen to a twenty-five year old becomes the key to telling the strength and ingenuity of dreams in PT Anderson’s film
A love story? One generational cross-section? A dip inAmerica dei Seventy
? The transition from adolescence to adulthood? Licorice Pizza
by Paul Thomas Anderson all this and more. As always in his films one would add, which start from a minimal fact and almost insignificant (here the brazen and somewhat arrogant proposal made by a fifteen to a twenty-five year old) to then widen along trails seemingly disunited than suddenly reconvert towards a goal. And if at first certain digressions may surprise, thinking about it later will reveal all their meaning and their necessity because – let’s face it right away – Licorice Pizza
(from the name of a chain of record stores that has nothing to do with the film but that the director frequented as a child) a film that grows in memory and that rises as the best cakes know how to make.
Look at how he presents the two protagonists, l’young Gary (Cooper Hoffmanson of Philip Seymour Hoffman) and the eldest Alana (Alana Haim): she walks alongside a long line of students waiting to take the photo for theschool yearbook, offering a comb and a mirror without getting answers, and the camera follows her in a long sequence that stops only when Gary accepts the offer. A few short cuts on the faces of him and her and then the sequence shot resumes in reverse, following the boy who, with the excuse of the mirror, has attacked speech with Alana, inviting her to dinner.
The ability of PTA (cos Paul Thomas Andersonto distinguish it from the other Andersons of the cinema) lies in the apparent simplicity of the result that knows how to return it first distracted look by Alana and then theresourcefulness of Gary, without being a slave to technique (he uses the continuity of the sequence shot only when he needs it and not as a demonstration of skill) but bending it to his needs (which make him to interrupt shooting with small cuts of close-ups).
In this way he manages to capture the attention of the viewer who seems to be at the side first of Alana and then of Gary, ready to follow them to see how to continue this strange courtship. And in the meantime it tells of two generations that are so close but also so different: the normality with which Gary lives his being television actor and the even more surprising normal (of adolescence?) with which he wants to persuade Alana to make the same profession; the managerial spirit – we are still in the America of opportunities – with which Gary invents himself an entrepreneur (di water mattresses and then of flipper); the small ones sentimental misadventures of her that unleash the jealousies of him and vice versa, with their mutual attraction and repulsion as only young people can do; professional misadventures with an overconfident client (a Bradley Cooper absolutely ingenious e hilarious: why they didn’t nominate him to the Oscars one of the mysteries of Hollywood); the selfishness and subterfuges of even the unsuspected, like the young candidate for mayor (Greg Goetzman) that Alana gets to work for; L’unreachable narcissism of those who believe they have arrived, like the Jack Holden played by Sean Penn and his friend Rex (Tom Waits).
Every now and then the movie appears divert to other roads (the client with two Japanese wives, the violence without explanation of the police against Gary, the strict observance of the Jewish precepts of Alina’s family, played by the real family of the young actress), giving the impression of getting lost among period reconstructions (the soundtrack, which passes from Bing Crosby to the Doorsgives Paul McCartney a Chuck Berry e David Bowie) and taste of the sketch (Gary’s childhood friends), but then everything finds its own right placeas in a cheerful and surprising puzzle, between youthful memories e adult fantasywithin a filmography that knows how to delve into obsessions (The hidden thread, The Master, The oilman) or restore the spirit of the times (Defect of form, Boogie Nights – L’altra Hollywood) but which, like here, also knows how to tell the force e l’gave
of dreams.
March 13, 2022 (change March 17, 2022 | 12:54)
© Time.News