Before my even more verbose than my usual standards view of
Model Shop, a surprisingly concise (for me) reminder of its predecessor:
Originally conceived as a Technicolor musical but shot on the cheap (so cheap they couldn't even afford a sound crew), Jacques Demy's
Lola isn't exactly the absolute masterpiece critics claimed back in 1961, but it is one of the more likable films of the French New Wave, largely because it's less concerned with scoring stylistic points and more interested in people. What's particularly refreshing is that Demy likes these people - all of them, without exception - and never judges them, and that generosity of spirit carries it a long way. Following the role coincidence plays in our lives through its characters whose paths and hearts cross, it staves off complete schmaltz with an awareness that one person's happy ending is often another's missed possibility of happiness: Demy may not be able to resist giving one character a Hollywood Happy Ending, but it does come at a price to another, while other characters lives are left unresolved.
There are a few moments where Anouk Aimee's tart with a heart overdoes the Marilyn impersonations (an affectation of the character rather than the actress) and Allan Scott's English dialogue sounds like it's been dubbed by a German reading phonetically, but they're fairly fleeting irritants and there's more than enough elsewhere to make up for it, not least Raoul Coutard's lovingly shot black and white Scope photography of Nantes.
Jacques Demy’s first and last American film, 1969’s
Model Shop, wasn’t a lucky picture. Demy and his wife Agnes Varda spent a long time working with one actor while preparing the picture only for Columbia to reject him in favour off Gary Lockwood, fresh off 2001, because there was no way on Earth anyone would ever pay money to see Harrison Ford in a movie (Varda covered the business in her documentaries The Wonderful World of Jacques Demy and The Beaches of Agnes). Then, when filming began leading lady Anouk Aimée, reprising her role from Demy’s first feature,
Lola, didn’t turn up for four weeks, forcing the picture to shut down while the studio threatened to sue her if she didn’t report for work.
Five Easy Pieces screenwriter Carol Eastman hid her collaboration – credited as working alongside Demy on the English dialogue, which is often more than a tad awkward – behind one of her pseudonyms, Adrien Joyce, while Columbia were so unimpressed by the finished film that they decided it was cheap enough to dump with little support. To no-one’s surprise – least of all the mostly negative contemporary critics – it flopped. Even fans of Demy’s earlier musicals were disappointed by the film’s bleaker tone.
The result is what the British call a Marmite Movie (named after the delicious/disgusting food paste that excites equally passionate love it/hate it reactions): you’ll either recognise something of your life in it and get swept up in it or you’ll despair at the aimless characters who talk but rarely say anything and the series of episodes that don’t necessarily add up to a story. This certainly isn’t a film about story but a mood piece, with the dominant mood in question being malaise. Like
Lola it’s a series of encounters and departures, some chance, some by design, and roads not taken by characters driven by hopes that crushingly aren’t shared by the objects of their obsessions. Just as his earlier French films caught the mood and character of the port cities they were set in, it catches the state of mind of Los Angeles, the way that it simultaneously empowers you to want to do great things while at the same time seducing you with its siren call into never actually doing them but to just go with the flow – quite literally in Lockwood’s case as he cruises through the city in his car like a fish caught up in the Gulf Stream, occasionally making landfall before rejoining the current.
Lockwood’s what was already a familiar movie character at the time, the disaffected youth who knows what he doesn’t want but can’t grasp quite what he does. He wants to create but doesn’t have the drive or discipline to commit to the hard work to make it happen, so instead just drifts aimlessly without an anchor or sense of purpose, living from handout to handout. He can’t commit to a relationship either, and, having spent months refusing to do anything his aspiring actress girlfriend (Alexandra Hay, often struggling with her on the nose ‘conventional aspirations’ dialogue) wants to make them happy, he’s in the last stages of a dead relationship where he’s barely there in every sense. He can’t even pretend to be happy at her opportunities or achievements and has to passively talk them down. When he wakes up in the morning his sole genuine concern is to somehow find the $100 he needs to keep the car he can’t afford from being repossessed, and even in that he’s hardly making a concentrated effort. Instead, after seeing Aimée in a parking lot, he finds himself following her with a mixture of fascination and ambivalence, eventually tracking her down to the model shop where she poses for $12 for 15 minutes…
Long before Marvel turned the idea into an industry, Demy created his own shared movie universe, and this shares characters not only with
Lola but, in conversation if not in person,
Bay of Angels, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and
The Young Girls of Rochefort. But, like the sadder but wiser Lola herself, it’s a more melancholy spirit, the excitement, joy and hope long lost and replaced by an existence with low expectations where chances are best not taken. Yet behind the jaded ennui there’s still a search for not just romance but romanticism, though in many ways it’s the city more than any of its inhabitants that Lockwood’s genuinely in love with. Still, it’s hard not to feel that he’s exactly the kind of man she complained about in the 1961 film, chasing her but not really caring about her as a person or what she wants, seeing her only for what she can give him. He’s not really a terrible person despite retreating into dismissive or sulky passive aggressive moments whenever his conversations with a woman don’t go the way he wants, he’s just too caught up in his own malaise to realise the negative effect he has on the women around him and not even thinking of change until the very last moments of the film.
Although sold as another
A Man and a Woman, it’s not even a real love story: in many ways it’s more like a rough draft of Richard Dreyfuss’ character arc in
American Graffiti. Even when Lockwood and Aimée finally do meet – and it’s a long, long wait – they don’t really start to communicate until they’re both in a parking lot in cars facing in opposite directions in a scene so full of missteps and thoughtless comments as Lockwood seems torn between professing his love and driving her away that you expect them to go off their separate ways. You know these two people don’t belong together and that if they ever do come together it’s more about briefly filling their own emptiness than true love.
While the casting of Lockwood may not seem the most exciting choice, he’s right for the role despite being too old for it. His vocal delivery at times reminiscent of a less abrasive young Alec Baldwin, with that same sense of taking affront when his own world is challenged, somehow he manages to keep you onboard with a character who is less than the romantic ideal or even especially likeable. As for Aimée, whose screen time is fairly minimal until the last third of the film, she offers an exercise in contrast that’s best appreciated after a re-viewing of the 1961 film to see how far her character has travelled and how experience has finally left its mark. Neither is likely to excite much feeling from the viewer, but it’s clear that that’s exactly what Demy is aiming for here.
Memorably described as a road movie that goes nowhere, you can certainly see why it can be a divisive film – you can make good cases for it being either a superficial waste of time with nothing genuine to say which doesn’t know what it wants to be or a film about superficial (but not necessarily worthless) people who still haven’t worked out what their place in the world is and can’t really communicate without resorting to facile clichés and instead just waste time. There’s no big cathartic emotional release to be had here: aside from Hay, everyone is emotionally numb. It doesn’t pander to the late 60s counterculture energy either: while frequently criticised for having no grasp of the issues of the day, it has a more pragmatic approach to the reality of the day – the band he sometimes hangs with (Spirit) are excited about the success of their first album and the prospect of a second album and tour, one friend he tries tapping for more money needs a previous loan back because his girlfriend just bought a colour TV and even the volunteer paper whose contributors he’s friends with are more concerned with boosting their circulation to pay the bills and manage the workflow than any big issue, with the draft something they have no solid position on beyond how it immediately affects them. Even Lockwood’s objection to the draft that he’s previously just been using as an excuse to not do or commit to anything has nothing to do with the rights or wrongs of the Vietnam War but the sudden very real possibility of dying now that he’s only got a couple of days left before he has to report for duty.
If the film has a passion it’s for the City of Los Angeles itself, and that might limit part of its appeal to people who have lived or worked there, because rather than the tourist spots it inhabits the veins of the city, the wide and interchangeable boulevards of one and two storey buildings, body shops and gas stations that seem to stretch out forever. Neither glamorised not deglamourised, it’s certainly a Los Angeles that I recognise even though there’s much less traffic (if made today he’d spend half the film stuck in gridlock), the tatty beach houses have been replaced by condos and there’s not a shopping mall in sight. It’s one of the most convincing portraits of the everyday LA that it’s all too easy to find yourself just drifting through, and that’s the best way to approach the film – something you drift through in a mood all its own, with nothing to do and little to say but still quietly hypnotic.
Along the way you can spot bit parts from future Psycho II screenwriter and Fright Night director Tom Holland as Hay’s friend and Fred Willard as a gas station attendant and an in-joke of sorts when Lockwood glances at a newspaper review of Varda’s documentary
Black Panthers.
Model Shop isn’t the kind of film that’s for everyone, but if you’re on its wavelength it’s hard to imagine this meditation on rootless souls getting a better-looking release (it certainly blows away Criterion’s Blu of Lola, but the negative for that was admittedly destroyed in a fire). Twilight Time’s Blu-ray boasts another top-notch master from Sony and the transfer is a massive leap from the French DVD in the worthwhile almost complete (and English-friendly) Jacques Demy DVD boxed set. Although listed as including TV spots and a trailer, it’s actually a collection of three TV spots that have been reframed to 1.85:1 – a 60-second, 20-second and a 10-second – which show how completely lost Columbia were at how exactly to market the film, selling the cast, director and ‘now’ nature of the film without ever giving any real sense of it. Other than that extras are limited to an isolated score and the customary booklet.
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