Anderson’s latest is a romance about a teen boy wooing an older woman, starring two extraordinary newcomers and stuffed with fabulously hammy A-list cameos
![Licorice Pizza review – Paul Thomas Anderson’s funniest and most relaxed film yet](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/84a2e1e9ceb749cb82d24868c9a06c9d6e26122b/1257_0_2562_1538/master/2562.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctcmV2aWV3LTUucG5n&enable=upscale&s=9d260f71b0d0c129b09928b321801409)
As a title for this
California pastoral from the sunlit west coast 1970s, Licorice Pizza is whimsically inspired. According to writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, it’s actually the name of a now defunct SoCal record store chain. I was hoping he was making that up, like Anthony Burgess’s supposed cockney phrase “Queer as a clockwork orange”. But no. It really did exist, though the movie itself teeters between reality and nostalgist-hallucination.
This is a love story set in 1973 (Erich Segal’s novel is in fact slyly positioned in one shot), and far too interesting and complicated to be called “coming-of-age”. A grinningly fast-talking 15-year-old boy meets a bored 25-year-old woman who works as assistant to a photographer taking pictures for the high-school yearbook. She is in equal parts amused, intrigued and depressed when this kid starts hitting on her, and she realises that she is somehow interested in him.