Model Shop (film)

Model Shop
Directed by	Jacques Demy
Produced by	Jacques Demy
Written by	Jacques Demy
Starring	Anouk Aimée Gary Lockwood Alexandra Hay
Music by	Spirit
Edited by	Walter Thompson
Distributed by	Columbia Pictures
Release dates	1969
Country	United States
Language	English

Model Shop is a 1969 American film by French writer-director Jacques Demy starring Gary Lockwood, Alexandra Hay and Anouk Aimée and featuring a guest appearance by Spirit who also recorded the soundtrack. Demy made Model Shop, which was his first English-language film, following the international success of his film, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

Aimée reprises the title role from Demy's 1960 French-language film Lola.

Plot summary

In Los Angeles in 1969, twenty-six-year old architect George Matthews (Gary Lockwood) is floundering. Unemployed and in debt, the would-be actress Gloria (Alexandra Hay) he lives with is tired of him and his car is due to be repossessed.

Going round friends to scrounge $100 to stave off the finance company, he sees a beautiful foreign woman (Anouk Aimée) in a white convertible and follows her to a mansion in the hills. Ringing up his parents, he learns that his draft notice has arrived and he must report for Army duty next week. For the first time, he comes face-to-face with his own mortality.

In the street he sees the beautiful woman again and follows her. She enters a model shop, a tawdry studio where customers can take erotic photographs, and he books a session with her. But she is uninterested in his attentions. Going home, he finds Gloria has landed a job with a new admirer, who is taking her out for the evening. Obsessed with the enigmatic foreigner, he returns to the model shop and books another session with her. She tells him she is French, named Cécile but working as Lola, and recounts some of her problems. Abandoned by her husband Michel for a female gambler named Jackie Demaistre, she is trying to make enough money to return to France and her child.

In a tender night of drinking and lovemaking at Lola's apartment, George and Lola talk of their failed romances, their hopes, their dashed dreams, philosophy, and mortality. Through their conversation, they each find the willpower to continue living and George gives her the money he borrowed to save his car. The next morning, when George goes home, he finds Gloria packing to leave. Ringing up Lola's apartment, her roommate tells him she now had enough cash for a plane ticket and had flown out early that morning. As they talk, a tow truck outside is removing his car. He says to the girl: "I just wanted to tell her that I love her. I wanted her to know that I was going to begin again. It sounds stupid, I know. But a person can always try."

Reception

Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum views Model Shop as one of director Jacques Demy's most critically underrated and neglected films,^[1] writing that "the play between actuality and artifice is the most complex and unconventional" in the film.

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky of The A.V. Club is also a major proponent of Model Shop, writing that Demy's film is "obsessively escapist" and that "every film [Demy] made, whether it had singing in it or not, was essentially a musical; he could make the sad streets of Nantes into an MGM back lot.".^[2] He later includes it in his "Cine-Autobiography", a list of unranked films which "opened doors or made [him] turn a corner.".^[3]

Charlotte Garson notes how the films of Demy, as in the works of Balzac and Proust, create a universe in which not only themes but characters reappear. A few of the recurring motifs in Model Shop are chance making or marring relationships, lovers parted by war, women surviving by near-prostitution and the USA as a world of sunshine where people drive open-top cars. Cécile is not only a character from Lola, which also featured her husband Michel, her lover Frankie and her child, but was mentioned in Les Demoiselles de Rochefort as well. Another mention is of the gambler Jackie from La Baie des Anges.^[4]

Model Shop is included on Sight and Sound 's list of 75 most neglected films. Films on the list were selected by 75 international critics as "unduly obscure and worthy of greater eminence”.^[5]

Appearances in other media

A brief portion of the film is seen at the beginning of the season seven episode of Mad Men, "Field Trip," when the character Don Draper is shown watching it in a theater.

See also

• Model Shop (album)

References

External links

• Model Shop at the Internet Movie Database
• Model Shop at Rotten Tomatoes
• New York Times Review 2/12/69
• Model Shop at TCMDB