| USA, 2021 | Romance/Coming of Age | Mainstream | Trailer |
If you ask anybody involved in the artistic creation of any kind of narrative fiction, they most probably will tell you that youth is a perfect setting for a story. It is a period of life that evokes strong, heartfelt emotions and excitement; and most importantly, it awakes the feelings of good old times to audiences in the autumn of their lives. Shortly said, nostalgia is a powerful motivator to tickle the emotions of any involved part in fiction consumptions. This is also a valid statement for the creative part. The rose-coloured flavour of youth’s memories acts as an inebriating drug that stimulates inspiration for developing stories where sympathy, bliss and endearment are predominant.
All these concepts (youth and old, nostalgia and powerful emotions) are the raw material Licorice Pizza has been forged out of. And if you melt them together, what comes out is, no more and no less, than the first love. Probably based on personal experiences, andecdotes and memories of director Paul Thomas Anderson, Licorice Pizza takes the boy and girl meet, split and meet archetype and makes it vibe. And precisely, Vibe is a powerful word to describe what this movie oozes and injects us, the audience. This picture is comfortable. It’s adorable. It’s blissful. It, just, makes you resonate in mysterious ways.
Clearly, the plot structure of this movie is not what makes it special, but everything annex to it. The main characters, Alana and Gary, just meet and do various things together, according to their respective ages. She is older than him, and thus the views on life and things that move them are different. While he enjoys his youth and tries to make year ’73 the best one ever, she wonders what will be of her and her future -especially in a time and context where women were not in their best position-. He is savvy, motivated and reckless, but also naïf and head-in-the-sky. She is reflective and caustic, but also brave, confident and resilient. Why do they spend time together? Why do they clash? Why are they irresistibly attracted to each other in ways they can’t even start to comprehend, in spite of all? One thing is clear, and the audience learns it well: move forward and don’t ask for sense. Take the good things life gives you and don’t let them go.
Licorice Pizza is an odd teenage movie and tells an odd romance -between amour fou and soulmate-, but starting from the most basic premise, adequately manipulated by dextrous hands. Both main characters have a fantastic chemistry. It’s a true treat to see them develop and just live in the screen. The amount of love and dedication the creative team has put in this movie to make it vibe is palatable. Like I have mentioned in others of my texts, when a director involves themselves personally and takes things from their own life experience for crafting their works, the result is always pleasing.
The personal involvement of the director is noticeable when you check out the details around this movie. Alana, the main character and actress, belongs to a musical band composed by her and her sisters -who also appear in Licorice Pizza-, whose associated videoclips were incidentally directed by Anderson. The friendship between them must be close. For sure, he must have perceived the intense charisma Alana’s presence irradiates many times, and definitely having wanted it for his filmic works. I also read that some of the scenes in the movie are taken out of personal vivencies of the director when he was young. In this sense, it reminds me to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (and not only because of the celebrity cameos and constant cultural references), as Quentin Tarantino also wanted to convey the world of his youth in that movie.
So the 1970’s feeling here can reign, the picture has been shot in a way that imitates the old film reels, with a certain grain, a soft sepia tonality and an extreme sensibility to light sources. This, combined with the dynamic movement scenes and the close-ups on the characters, makes me remember the way American Graffitti was shot, which surely was an influence too. Aside of that, Licorice Pizza presents and mocks some of the horrible and outdated accepted behaviourals of the 1970’s, and makes them contrast with today’s sensibilities.
Licorice Pizza has multiple aspects, all of them converge in a way to excite powerful feelings in the audience. Fun, oddity, crazy love, joie de vivre, charm and charisma, nostalgia for a lost time (even for the audience that never experienced these years), big gulps of bliss, and a charming hedonistic airheadedness, all these are wrapped into a package of neo-classic filmmaking. For sure, it’s the whole meaning of youth.