MOVIE REVIEW – Paul Thomas Anderson’s look back at a bygone era couldn’t be more personal – especially with such a good cast. Licorice Pizza, set in the early 1970s, is a coming-age comedy, drama, and a great period piece with flawless performances. At the same time, Anderson’s other film, Love’s Awkward, is a spiritual prequel, and the filmmaker’s look back at a bygone era couldn’t be more personal.

He’s taken us backwards before: the early 20th century West in There Will Be Blood; a curdled postwar America in The Master; London’s Fifties fashion world in Phantom Thread; the morning-after hangover of Sixties SoCal counterculture in Inherent Vice; that transitional moment from Me Decade funkiness to coked-up Reagan-era jitteriness in Boogie Nights.

But now, the 51-year-old writer-director wants us to join him for a return to an extraordinary moment in an extraordinary place. It’s 1973, deep in the suburbs of the San Fernando Valley. The variety shows are still on the television. The gas shortage is causing a lot of headaches for Californians. Japanese restaurants are an exotic novelty, Hollywood’s old guard continues to get drunk on the fancy nightclubs, pinball remains temporarily illegal in the greater L.A. area, and the latest sleep technology – something called a “waterbed” – is about to sweep the country. Gone are the days when young women in Hollywood were encouraged to commit murder by crazed cult drivers; now there’s only one bearded, narcissistic and harassing showbiz man roaming the country, offering peanut butter sandwiches to pretty women. Once upon a time, in Encino…

No specific explanation for the title

Licorice Pizza dabbles in many genres over its more than two-hour running time, from romantic comedy to double coming-of-age tale to American success story while telling the story of two young people. But it’s also a very memorable piece, and although Anderson was only three when this romantic coming-of-age story takes place, it’s clear that he’s returning to an era that he’ll forever hold in his heart. Proust had his madeleines and his Sunday mornings at Combray. Paul Thomas Anderson had his film cameras, production designers and the Tail O’ the Cock restaurant on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks.

The film is such an intimate, personal retrospective that it almost feels like flipping through someone’s old scrapbook. Even the title, which refers to a regional chain of record stores in Los Angeles that was all the rage at the time, is essentially just a nod to the mood of the times, as there is no logical reason for the film to be called that.

It starts with a simple flirtation

From across a crowded high school hallway, Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, son of the late legendary actor Philip Seymour Hoffman) spots Alana Kane (Alana Haim) rolling her eyes and grumbling about her fate. She’s fifteen and queuing for her yearbook photo. She’s 25 and works for the company hired to take her photos, and Valentine takes a liking to her and starts chatting her up. He’s a child actor, and maybe she’s seen some of him before? No, not really. Plus, she doesn’t want to go out to dinner with him, so he nipped the idea in the bud. Still, he keeps talking. And she listens. As Nina Simone’s beautiful “July Tree” plays in the background, you can see that he’s starting to win her over. Anderson loves only the hopeless romantics more than the tortured antiheroes – see Tortured Love. Although Alana doesn’t become Gary’s girlfriend, she might meet him later at a restaurant. Maybe not.

All of this could be the beginning of a thriller about stalking if Hoffman and Haim didn’t give this opening back-and-forth such a nice, light-hearted twist. “Don’t be creepy, please,” she tells him when he reluctantly shows up anyway, and they share a meal. “Stop calling me all the time, okay?” she says when he gives her his phone number at the end of the evening. When Valentine needs someone to accompany him to a TV appearance in New York, she goes with him. When he decides to start a waterbed manufacturing company, one of many other irons in the fire for this budding con man, she goes into business with him. No immediate romantic overtures are made, but the more Valentine’s circle of friends she gets, and the more jealous they make each other by pursuing peripheral relationships, the stronger the connection the two of them develop. The resistance is constant and, of course, futile.

Non-linear story

If we were to describe more about the plot of Licorice Pizza, we would have to assume that there is anything that can be called a plot. Anderson is more interested in setting up almost random anecdotes and adventures for these two and letting the incidents collide with almost conscious randomness than getting from point A to point B. There are mistaken arrests, other business ventures, successes, failures and screw-ups. Sean Penn pops up as a version of William Holden as he and Tom Waits (!!!) play a little late-night celebrity folklore with cocktails and motorcycle stunt rides. Harriet Sansom Harris plays a casting agent who swoons over Kane (“You’re like an English pit bull dog! With a sexy charm! And you’ve got a very Jewish nose!”). In a scene that lasts about five minutes, she almost teases the audience with her performance, which is extremely funny and suggestive.

But the film is not without its “flirtation” with politics, with the story of Joel Wachs (Benny Safdie), who awkwardly mixes his election campaign with his not very successful private life. And let’s not forget the brilliant performance of Bradley Cooper’s unique, monomaniacal character. Cooper is playing a character he himself has known for a long time: Jon Peters, the hairdresser-turned-Hollywood producer famous for various scandals, played here by a raving idiot in a tight white disco suit who is the devil of the protagonists’ wildest and craziest night out. Bradley Cooper (who was recently seen as the lead in Nightmare Alley) shows his talent as an actor in this brief cameo-like supporting role. Speaking of cameos, it is also worth mentioning George DiCaprio, a producer, writer, publisher and the father of underground comics – and not least actor Leonardo DiCaprio.

Licorice Pizza is not only a charming, fun, amusing coming-to-age romantic film but also a stylish, excellent period piece from the 1970s. We could perhaps not find a more ideal escapist film for an intelligent two-hour-plus diversion and nostalgia for older people in this bleak present.

-BadSector-