She is not unaware of the odds stacked against her: “He is rich and famous and was going to take me out of here!” she wails at her father after a Shabbat date with Gary’s heartthrob co-star Lance (Skyler Gisondo) goes awry. This is the environment in which Alana would have been brought up. The Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which finally stopped women being unfairly fired for getting pregnant, didn’t come into force until 1978. The Marriage Bar, which prohibited married women from working, was still in place up until 1973. More women were college-educated than any other period in the US, yet only 13.3 per cent of those with a BA degree had gone into the labour force. But outside of the arena of domesticity, women’s futures in the workplace were still a looming question mark. Roe v Wade had recently legalised abortion, making strides for women’s bodily autonomy.
HAIM DAYS ARE GONE LEAK FULL
Within this, Anderson slyly uses Alana’s unwillingness to grow up to interrogate the pressures that women in US society faced in the Seventies.īy 1973, the sexual revolution and the Women’s Liberation Movement were already in full swing. Instead, the film uses an offbeat relationship as a way to explore what Anderson describes as the “sticky stuff” of growing up – the parts of us we dispose of as we age, like youthful optimism or the terrible pleasure of a crush.
But the will-they-won’t-they dynamic doesn’t hang over the film, nor is it even the point. Many viewers on social media platforms have recently derided the film’s age gap (Gary is a minor) as “problematic”, some even going as far as to cite it as “predatory” and in danger of “glamourising paedophilia”. They’re both at odds with themselves she’s a case of arrested development, he talks like he’s Frank Sinatra but can’t manifest anything stronger than an order of two cokes at the bar. With Alana, Gary is endearingly confident, bringing her into his worlds, whether a Hollywood venture as his chaperone, a waterbed sales girl at his store, or helping her to embrace her dreams of becoming an actor.
They bounce off of one another like pinballs in a machine. With Gary, Alana is luminous, putting him and his child-actor charm in their place with a self-possession that is not on display when she’s around powerful, older men.
Her gaze is central.ĭespite the age difference, the swirling chemistry between them is evident. Alana is brimming with the eye-rolling resistance of a 25-year-old made the object of male teen lust, but she never becomes a one-note fantasy. Gary Valentine ( Cooper Hoffman, son of the late great Phillip Seymour Hoffman) is a precocious 15-year-old former child actor in puppyish thrall to Alana Kane ( Alana Haim, of the band Haim), a Barbara Stanwyck-esque firecracker. We open upon a meet-cute of the most unlikely kind: she’s the photographer’s assistant at his high school’s picture day. But most of all, Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film is a journey of the self, masquerading as a coming-of-age romance. Licorice Pizza is many things: a sun-soaked paean to 1970s LA an earnest exploration of first love a joyfully juvenile tribute to screwball cinema a silly and voyeuristic behind-the-scenes slice of Tinseltown. Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim in Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest movie, ‘Licorice Pizza’ (MGM)
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