For all the outward simplicity of the new film of Paul Thomas Anderson, who always surprises us (can you forget his multi-figured, sad fresco «Magnolia», the majestic epic «Oil», the thinnest, thin pen, written metaphysical psychodrama «The Master» or the airy Gothic novel » The ghost thread «) has something to surprise.
1973. California. High schooler Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman), tied to acting in simple children's music TV shows, falls deafeningly in love with school photographer and volunteer Alana Kane (Alan Haim), who is ten years his senior. A girl from a traditional Jewish family works part-time in a photo studio, and, of course, looks down at the amorous, unceremonious teenager from her “old age”.
The brain of an over-communicative, well-fed teenager with the vocation of a showman and the manners of Ostap Bender is bursting with ideas. Where to find it all the time: fly to record with a shkolota in a TV musical, become a star like Dean Martin or the new idol of your favorite series «The Patridge Family», spin a fashion business with water beds or pinball machines, and, finally, catch on the net her own irresistibility, the one she dreams of.
< p> What do they have in common? Nothing! They are day and night, pizza and licorice sauce. A self-confident idealist whose milk on his lips has not dried. And an adult, not self-confident miss, who would have long since run from an archaic house. The original impossibility of the novel — and the obvious incredible: the careful convergence of night and day at the edge of dawn, and even the first adult date. Disheveled and lively, vulnerable and certainly unpredictable relationship. And then a cascade of eccentric situations involving real and fictional celebrities of the time.
Licorice Pizza is a very personal movie. And it's not about the facts of the director's biography, caught on a living thread in the film. And in its air, mirages over the hot asphalt, magnesium flashes of a camera taking portraits of schoolchildren for graduation photos, in unreasonable laughter and sadness. In a scattering of details, seemingly random, intangible images of the blues of first love with the smell of licorice.
The author of the film, as David Bowie sings in the program song Life on Mars ?, walks «through his sunken sleep to the shores of lost youth» — with her bright clothes, risky minis, ringing relationships in which everything is a dizzying event: and breathing into the tube, and a slap in the face, and a plexus of hands, and “love knocking down.”
Anderson takes us to the San Fernando Valley, where he grew up. Into the countryside on the doorstep to shining Hollywood. With visible pleasure he juggles names that are overvalued to him: Tail O 'the Cock — once a popular restaurant in Sherman Oaks, the Licorice Pizza record store chain that gave the film its name. Around the heroes there is a motley string of memorable flashes of characters.
Sean Penn as aging star Jack Holden, showing with the last bit of strength that there is still gunpowder … in his motorcycle. It is clear that this is an instant portrait of the Oscar-winner William Holden, the star of films by Wilder, Lean, Lumette. John S. Reilly will appear before us as actor and artist Fred Gwynn. Christine Ebersol plays comedienne Lucy Doolittle, based off the hit comedian Lucille Ball.
And Bradley Cooper is irresistible as nervous producer John Peters. In the film (as in life) he is the cohabitant of the most heavenly Barbra Streisand, to whom he hurries on a date.
The viewer may not count all the names of half-forgotten stars, but he will smell the time. Plunge into a company with authors in a sentimental rave «on the waves of my memory.»
Still from the movie «Licorice Friday»
Paul Thomas Anderson travels to the seventies with his trusty cameraman Michael Bauman. Nostalgia always deforms a real picture, covers it with the dust of time, animating moments from a velvet family photo album, gives the image graininess and tactility. The camera is not afraid of the scorching sun, impudently looking directly into the lens, or indistinct twilight, when the heart is melancholy. And the melancholic soundtrack of Johnny Greenwood, the director's constant musical co-author — to his aid: David Bowie, McCartney, Donovan, Clarence Carter. This hypnotic album cannot be forgotten.
And the action itself either sways casually, then flies forward like a truck without brakes. History wanders aimlessly like a teenager skipping class, chatting about nothing. “Just don’t ask me about Koala Lumpur.”
In the background lovestory fireworks — a gloomy landscape of reality, in which the oil embargo and the gas crisis, Vietnam, political confusion and another hopeless election. But falling in love and youth not only ignores, but reverses the significance of events. When everything personal, intimate is on a large scale, and all the world's evil is annoying somewhere out there, on a general plan.
Cooper Hoffman, the son of Philip Seymour Hoffman, is a 15-year-old debutant who inherited his father’s charisma , the charm of an imperfect face. Zero stardom, only the energy of unspent strength, the audacity of youth, when everything is on the shoulder, when drunk from opportunities. Another unconditional discovery is Alana Haim, in which ordinary and uncommonness are indissoluble, which is interesting to look at, as once upon a young Barbra Streisand.