Model Shop **** (1969, Gary Lockwood, Anouk Aimée, Alexandra Hay) – Classic Movie Review 4,302

French director Jacques Demy’s first film made in America and in English is hypnotically compelling and shamefully underrated. Demy reunites with Anouk Aimée, who also plays a character named Lola in his debut film Lola (1961).

Gary Lockwood from 2001: A Space Odyssey stars here in the 1969 film Model Shop as George Matthews, an alienated mid-20s designer who has a fling with Lola, aka Cécile (Anouk Aimée), a French divorcée in Los Angeles, working in a place where pin-up models can be photographed for money. Lockwood gives a resonant, entrancing performance, Aimée is enchanting and Demy brings an acute foreigner’s view of the Los Angeles scene.

The Model Shop is low on plot and action, but high on compulsive mood and atmosphere, and there is an irresistibly haunting, mesmerising tone. It plays like a dream but connects with reality too, conveying exactly how cruising in a car through LA is.

Lockwood and Aimée have the film pretty much to themselves, but Alexandra Hay as the hero’s girlfriend Gloria, Carole Cole, Severn Darden, Tom Fielding, Ned Elliott, Jacqueline Miller and Anne Randall also appear.

You couldn’t sell a movie today advertising it as ‘Maybe Tomorrow. Maybe Never. Maybe.’ But then they couldn’t sell it like that in 1969 either and it flopped.

Demy’s first choice was Harrison Ford, who was rejected by studio Columbia, saying he would fail to make money. Demy’s wife Agnès Varda shot a still surviving screen test of Ford.

Aimée also plays a character named Lola in Demy’s first film, Lola (1961), an homage to the work of Max Ophüls.

Anouk Aimée [Nicole Françoise Florence Dreyfus] (27 April 1932 – 18 June 2024) appeared in 70 films from 1947 until 2019.

Among her films are Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), Fellini’s 8½ (1963), Jacques Demy’s Lola (1961), Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman [Un homme et une femme], George Cukor’s Justine (1969), Jacques Demy’s Model Shop (1969), Bernardo Bertolucci’s Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1981) and Robert Altman’s Prêt à Porter (1994).

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