Return to teenagers with Licorice Pizza – Francesco Boille

Lateral, slightly oblique, airy camera movements film the slow pace of a girl in a crowded American college. The sense of space expressed by the director communicates the feeling of a large space, of the possibility of conquering it to fulfill one’s dreams as a young man.

Great is the lightness of Licorice Pizza. How much his intelligence and his density of content, for an extraordinary and vital fresco of adolescence. Check out Paul Thomas Anderson’s new feature film in theaters on March 17th: much more than a teen movie author, is one of the best representations of love for life and human beings that I have happened to see at the cinema in recent years; the multifaceted fresco of an era and of human typologies that wants to tell from an unprecedented angle the oldest and noblest theme of life, or the birth of a love.

You will have fun nourishing your interiority and – beautiful paradox – despite the references to a climate of anxiety from the past, you will leave the cinema with positive feelings, after having abandoned the climate of war for over two hours. The spectator will be able to pair with the excellent Red rocket by Sean Baker, presented in competition at the last Cannes. A vivid and luminous photograph of an America of marginal and alienated people through the iconoclastic, yet human, portrait of a chaotic porn actor, moreover very well played by rapper Simon Rex.

Here, however, photography is of another genre, and tells of another era. We are in the United States in the early seventies, at the height of the presidency law and order by the republican Richard Nixon, who before leaving Vietnam heavily involved Cambodia in the bombings, however, receiving heavy criticism from the national press. And then – much more emphasized by the film – we are in the midst of the energy crisis caused by the Yom Kippur War and the consequent rationing of petrol, a fact not just in a country where the car was more than a symbol of the American dream. The lines at the petrol pumps and the president’s sermons are there, yes, but they remain in the background, while the rock music of the time is much more present and enveloping. And there is also politics, both explicitly and implicitly.

The director, in fact, photographs a state of permanent crisis, an asphyxiating and anxious psychological hood won only by the protagonist, who we could call an adolescent soul that identifies itself as a real resistance of the spirit, a sort of unconscious wisdom and like an indomitable life force. Anderson demonstrates the unique ability to calibrate, moving like a tightrope walker on a thin thread, placing the right emphases on what happens in the adult world without affecting the representation of adolescence, that is, that of children who try to become adults and at the same time to preserve, albeit confusedly, their bubble, their “other” vision of the world.

But the filmmaker in his new feature film brings to fruition several exploits. The first is to portray not beautiful teenagers and young people. And nevertheless making them beautiful. In the sense that directing – if it is true that cinema is gaze – pushes the viewer’s eye to grasp the beauty of human beings a priori not exactly showy, who are sometimes still budding even if they thrill at the idea of ​​being able to blossom. Sport has not yet completely slender their bodies a bit ‘heavy, the skin still has impurities, pimples. No really well-known captivating stars to attract viewers.

He, Gary, is Cooper Hoffman: son of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, interpreter of many films of the director and a great friend of Anderson, here at his absolute debut. After his father’s untimely death, Anderson practically took him under his protection, and it’s a surprise. She, Alana, is Alana Haim: she is also making her debut in the cinema, and no less surprising in the result. She in real life she is a musician and she, along with her two sisters, she plays in the Californian band Haim. How much work on their faces, in the caravanserai that surrounds them which, on the contrary, does not diminish their strength. For them, to magnify them with lyricism – another exploit – Anderson went big: a lot of joyful noise, excitement, rhythm, music, actors and extras. Just like you do when you have famous actors, big stars and not perfect strangers in the cast. Moreover, not beautiful. And yet beautiful, as we have said. Not to mention the difference in age. Gary, who aspires to be an actor, is really a teenager. Alana is in her twenties, but she looks both forward and backward.

Not only. The management of this love at first sight, which takes the complicated path of a demure and intense friendship, also ends up in a series of hellish tortuous detours before finally reaching its destination. And here is another uniqueness of the film: the ability to be political, albeit in an indirect and figurative way, in an indissoluble way to the portrait of the adolescent age, just as the intimate is indissoluble from the choral. Because in narrating adolescence as a unique and privileged, albeit difficult, state of life, the director – who also signs the screenplay and photography (the latter together with Michael Bauman) – stages an often hilarious succession of situations and characters that they want alternatives but are instead only pompous in exhibiting their presumed being alternatives.

The characters played by Tom Waits, Sean Penn and above all Bradley Cooper (really extraordinary) are at the center of a series of scenes that reveal an ego that is often disproportionate as it is grotesque. There are several nonsense sequences, surreal while being absolutely believable as real. We mention only one so as not to disperse the surprise: the arrest of Gary for murder, which in a few moments dissolves into thin air. A sequence that best expresses the absurd world in which children are preparing to pass, to enter inside. Aspirated by this caravanserai of the absurd, by the waste of time for pleasant and senseless things typical of the adult world, the boys, and the gang of boy-mascots following them, will be able to keep the bar straight of authenticity and lucidity.

Paradigmatic is the nocturnal, almost unreal, phantasmagoric image of cars and cars that go around the petrol pump. The false and absurd world of adults turns but at the same time does not turn in its now blocked merry-go-round of perennial consumption. Inconclusive, in fact. Here is the political comment, which borders on mockery, on the historical situation. Anderson prefers an oblique and distorted gaze, implicit rather than explicit. He talks about the past to better talk about the present.

But in this world of fake adolescence of American society that has always hidden glamor and infantilism behind it smile the worst cynicism, consisting of fairs of silly waterbeds or of a porn industry beginning to flourish, of pizza and licorice, of which the director was greedy as a teenager, Anderson actually continues that discourse on the American and capitalist society that is patiently tracing for years with his films, often touching the symbols of consumerism or gaming (such as, for example, the business linked to the prodigies of television quizzes told in Magnolia). Here she expresses it concealed, with a surreal tone (in the past already present, just think, always in Magnoliato the rain of frogs almost a la Magritte).

And even when politics comes explicitly, as in the character of the idealist politician who hides his homosexuality, the adult world, even at its best, is not exciting. Overcoming ambivalences, whatever they may be, is not easy and perhaps for this very reason it is so difficult to end adolescence. For everyone.