Review of Licorice Pizza (2021) by Jluis_001 — 02 Dec 2021

Licorice Pizza is actually a very light film. And there's nothing wrong with that.

It's basically a dreamy vision of an era. Mostly about youth.

The plot is the least important thing about it. What we are offered is two young folks played byLicorice Pizza is actually a very light film. And there's nothing wrong with that.

It's basically a dreamy vision of an era. Mostly about youth.

The plot is the least important thing about it. What we are offered is two young folks played by Cooper Hoffman, and Alana Haim.

Both making their debut in front of the cameras, in a story that is pleasantly unexpected.

You never really know where it's headed, but the journey doesn't stop being interesting, and for that reason, even if it doesn't seem like the story will have some sort of message in its final passage, it also manages to make you want to know where it will end.

The chemistry of his central characters is the best thing Anderson could have aspired to as their director, because although the plot makes it clear that in their relationship there's a notorious age difference, their dynamic, though platonic, shows us a happy youthful experience, with them having fun, working, flirting, wanting to make each other believe that they are not really interested in each other.

Along the way they fall in love with other people while avoiding their true feelings, and that dynamic, along with all the other experiences they go through, even when they are apart, are the strength of this film.

We see their relationship constantly evolve, and that really constitutes the entire narrative arc of this story.

It's simple, but it's quite effective.

Its conclusion is inevitably romantic, sugarcoated.

But while one could argue that this feels like a safe, predictable passage, Anderson makes it all flow in a genuine way, and that's a very hard thing to pull off.

Because the detail here isn't that it builds a too-good-to-be-true idyll, but that this feels entirely natural within the process the story goes through.

If you as a viewer are able to buy everything else, but not its ending, I think your own expectations have played a trick on you.

At the conclusion we realize that we didn't really get anywhere. But when an adventure is fun and endearing, its denouement is usually the point you remember the least fondly.

Certainly, I'll always root for films to have a solid ending, but with Licorice Pizza the journey is more than enjoyable, and it comes to an end because it has to, and because I actually think Anderson himself understood perfectly well, that after that point, there really wasn't anything more to say.

This film is really going into my 2021 Top Ten.