Sometimes it is easy to attach too much significance to a song in a film, but sometimes there is a connection so deep and fruitful that its roots are inescapably grown entwined with the fabric of the feature. David Bowie’s surreal glam rock ballad of a young woman adrift and grasping for meaning. She searches for her friends but finds only the magic of her dreams in the mythical Hollywood hills, and their products, which no longer relates to her experience. It is an American dream crippled and lying exposed on the sidewalk and it is a grasping life we can see in ourselves - in search of import and purpose, dreams flanderingly inert, caught between the push of the crushing now and the pull of the hopeful could be… Is there a life for me?…Is this who I am?… Am I the girl sacrificing to be like the rest?.. Am I creating it all?....Is there Life on Mars?...
Perhaps my unabashed Bowie adoration became a fixation in my brain, overtly referred to in the trailer and then elegantly placed in the final film, one that I could not unentangle myself from. So be it, for we find significance where we impart it, and if that connection lets me bridge the gap between what brain struggles with and my heart desires, then a journey with the Starman to the red planet is for the best.
Licorice Pizza is a startling simplistic tale of romantic teenage love, the search for acceptance, and the realization of self - all set against the maddening and so often larger than life backdrop of 70’s Los Angeles. And while the loves river trickles down a curving ravine, like the winding roadway of Mulholland, the fact that it is between a precociously forward and enterprising 15 year old actor and the adrift but aspiring 20 something that he is smitten with is a boulder that must be surmounted, or you will be crushed by it. I cannot say that I don’t still feel odd misgivings about the bizarre, rickety and idyllic boat they construct, but the waters of affinity calmed and soothed as we made it to the final embankment.
The film starts from his childish and inexperienced perspective - seeing his desire and endeavoring to be near if not with her. Thankfully the focus eventually gravitates to her point of view - feeling stifled by life and the world, searching for a leg up and a foothold to climb. Alana Haim is magnetic and deftly inhabits the role of the pre-millennial millennial; stuck at home, unsure where to go, hard up for cash, questioning every decision, and wondering if there is a higher calling to it all. LP is her film and it is the complexities of her character, and her search for her own identity as she revolves around the planetoid of (a) youth, ring true and wistful.
This might be PTA’s most patent and sincere film. Its fun, whimsical, and heartfelt - no touch of the acerbic or the crestfallen - almost cherubic and amorous, even when surrounded by the burden of modernity, mores, the moronic, and the manic. It gives voice to those searching for more; more than they are, more than they have, and more that could be. Those answers may be solipsistic but just as important as “Is there Life on Mars?”.
