Escaping in First Love | "Licorice Pizza"

A wandering coming of age tale confirms the bruises and adventure of falling in love and creating a life of your own.

The film begins with Alana Kane, a twenty five year old photography assistant prepping kids for yearbook photos, and a surprising conversation with Gary Valentine, a self confident fifteen year old who makes the self-fulfilling prophecy that they were meant to meet. Flattered and somewhat intrigued, Alana agrees to a dinner and finds in Gary a refreshing clarity of purpose amidst her own insecurities. A showman and actor in the entertainment world, Gary, played by Cooper Hoffman, defines his success and people skills as part of who he is. When expressing her frustrations and ambivalence to her own future, Alana, played by Alana Haim, receives a hearty, “You should start a business.”

For his part, Gary is already a natural salesman and pursues emerging business opportunities in a quest for the independence of adulthood. He employs his younger brothers in a waterbed startup, a pin ball arcade, and a short stint of political filmmaking, all while harboring a platonic love for Alana. For Alana, the show business and Gary’s entrepreneurship is an enchanting new world. She learns a few tricks of opportunism, and agrees to be his driver. While diving in as partner and actress, however, she struggles to find a place amongst an industry defined by duplicity. When meeting with a senior producer and actor, Jack Holden, for a drink after an interview, she naively asks if they are speaking for real or just lines. The wild business ventures of Gary become increasingly immature in her eyes, as she feels pressure to “make a change in the world”. Is Gary’s world an escape from real responsibility? What are those responsibilities? Should she let herself love him? The same could be said for the movie itself.

Without a traditional narrative structure, Licorice Pizza moves from one scene to the next in a rapid sequence of surprise encounters. Like a dream, the viewer is pulled into and immersed in a world of the early 1970s San Fernando Valley, bell-bottom jeans, Bowie, Hollywood stars and all. Even so, an unspoken social tension lurks behind the scenes, and sometimes in plain sight, as seen with agents using racial undertones, lines of cars during gas shortages, pedophilia within the film industry, and the complications of hiding homosexuality in a political race. While relevant today, these issues primarily serve to propel the development of Gary and Alana’s relationship and the camera maintains a blissful reverie of first love.

“Do you even know what’s going on in the world?”, Alana levels at Gary at the defining moment of their relationship. Without a strong rebuttal, Gary takes the keys to look at pinball machines but is tormented when she doesn’t show up to the arcade's opening night. At first. Stated another way, Does the whole world revolve around you? And should it? Paul Thomas Anderson seems to say, you’re the driver of your own car, but the companions are what’s most important.