Model Shop (1969)

Director: Jacques Demy

Producer: Jacques Demy

Writer: Jacques Demy

Starring: Anouk Aimeé; Gary Lockwood; Alexandra Hall

Cinematography: Michel Hugo

Music: Spirit

Rated: M

Running time: 97 mins.

  Los Angeles, 1968.

    George Matthews (Gary Lockwood), a rather shiftless twenty-six year old out of work architect, who is trying to make sense out of his life and decide what he wants to do, wanders around Los Angeles in his MG trying to borrow one hundred dollars in order to save his car from being repossessed. In his travels he encounters Lola (Anouk Aimeé), a French Model Shop girl, who is trying to earn enough money to get back home to her young son in France. In the course of a twenty-four hour period George, through the events of the day, his various conversations with friends and Lola, and ultimately spending the night with her, decides to turn his life around and try to start over.

    The plot of Jacques Demy’s Model Shop is very simple, very new wave French and resembles the format used by Agnès Varda (Demy’s wife) in Cléo from 9 to 7 (1962). The script was written by Demy in French and then translated into English causing the dialogues to seem a bit unnatural at times. But there is a certain honest quality in this film that is hard to discern at first. You have to watch it more than once. What appeals right away is that it presents a picture of Los Angeles, and, by extension, of our country, at a particular and crucial time, the late 1960s. The cinematography is stunning. Demy makes excellent use of natural light, deep focus shots and sharp close-ups, and bathes his scenes in soft pastel colors that make even George and his girlfriend Gloria’s rundown bungalow at the beach and the tacky model shop on Santa Monica Boulevard look warm and inviting.

     The film gives a view of a place and a time that really does not exist anymore. George and Gloria (Alexandra Hay) live in a sparsely populated section of Venice next to an oil well derrick right on Dockweiler Beach (amazingly the house is still there), an area that is now part of the Marina, where expensive condos and townhouses cover every inch of space. The Sunset Strip, now overdeveloped and crowded, is dotted with empty spaces visible when George in his wanderings turns on to Sunset Plaza Drive. Long gone Icons of the past like Carolina Pines, Dino’s, SantaFair Pharmacy, Cascade Car Wash and the Playboy Club appear as he rides down Sunset and Santa Monica Boulevards; and we get a good look at Santa Monica Boulevard in all its pre-gentrification grittiness. The film has been aptly called “a moment in time caught in amber”.

     Like Varda’s character Cléo in Cléo from 9 to 7 George’s travels during the day bring him into contact with a mixed assortment of people: a hitchhiking teenage girl who gives him a joint, a psychedelic rock band Spirit, workers on an underground newspaper, gogo girl cashiers in a tacky model shop, a creepy camera store attendant, a full service gas station attendant (an uncredited Fred Willard), who could have been his double, pool players in a smokey coffee shop/pool hall (a hamburger and coffee 65 cents!), an exotic dancer, and sympathetic repo men who want to repossess his little green MG. The Vietnam War also intrudes on George’s day, for during the course of the day he learns that he has been drafted and must report in a few days.

     George is representative of the young people of that time, who were living through a social revolution and had trouble knowing which way the wind was blowing. The movie will have a definite appeal to those who lived through those times, especially those who were young men to whom the world had just opened up and was allowing them to experience a freedom their parents never had, but who had a military draft and an unwanted war hanging over their heads. George in his MG trying to sort out his existential crisis is a sort of “Sisyphus in a sports car”. It’s easy to empathize with George.

     Lola too is a character who invites sympathy, if not empathy. She is a divorced woman without legal status stranded in a foreign country forced to do rather menial and degrading work to earn her plane fare home to France. George finds love in Lola, and Lola encounters generosity and honesty in George. They both gain something from their brief encounter and that makes their parting less sad.

      Demy was a romantic as was evident from his earlier works The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967). He liked L.A. and was sympathetic to the youth culture that was centered here; this affection is apparent in the cinematography and dialogue--- especially in the conversations George has with his young friends. Los Angeles is definitely a character in this movie. His original title for the movie was Los Angeles-1968. Demy admired the geometry of the city; for him, it was a city of cars, parking lots, gas stations, and shabby stores, but nevertheless a vibrant place with a subtle appeal, a place of “pure poetry” and “baroque harmony”, a place where even brief encounters can alter lives. 

Note: Compare this look at L.A. with my future overview of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970), also dealing with the 60s L.A. youth culture, and made at the same time by another gifted European filmmaker--- but miles away in intent and style.