The Model Shop was released by Columbia Pictures on April 1, 1969
Director: Jacques Demy
The Model Shop cast: Gary Lockwood, Anouk Aimee, and Alexandra Hay
Due to its failure at the box office, the low-budget film, The Model Shop, was French new-wave director Jacques Demy’s only American film. But since its original release, it has been generally re-evaluated as a 60’s era classic. It’s not that the film has improved with age—it hasn’t! In it, a young, unemployed architech, who is about to be dumped by his girlfriend, have his car repossessed, and be drafted into the Army, meets and becomes infatuated with an equally unlucky French woman who is modeling in a seedy, Sunset Strip, photographer’s Model Shop trying to make enough money to get back to Paris. They come together for a night of love making, a sharing of sorrows, and eventually decide that life is still worth living. Some of the performances are amateurish, and the story of two alienated drifters who can’t connect didn’t connect with viewers in 1969, and is unlikely to now. The film’s, now nostalgic, charm comes mainly from its listless style and hippie era L.A. setting. Demy, (who was quite impressed with L.A.) takes his camera through a string of odd-ball, Hollywood localities in a near continuous traveling shot that barely strays more than a mile from the Sunset Strip, which is really the star of the show.
Featured Califormulants
Throughout the film (which provides drive-by glimpses of several mid-century L.A. landmarks including the Playboy Club, the Carolina Pines restaurant, and even stops in at a rehearsal of the L.A. rock band, Spirit. Throughout the film, Mr. Lockwood tools around in the same model of MG sports car that I referred to in chapter 20 as having launched the sports car craze in the U.S. Other scenes of interest include a dilapidated Huntington Beach, beach house with adjoining oil derrick, and a side trip into the high-dollar, suburban hills above the strip.