Model Shop

If, as Julie Kirgo suggests in her deliciously informative essay for the Twilight Time Blu-ray edition, the 1969 film "Model Shop" is a kind of cinematic poem to the city of Los Angeles by French filmmaker Jacques Demy (late husband of the once more au courant filmmaker and artist Agn�s Varda), then its central protagonist is arguably not its human focus - the itchy, dissatisfied, and unemployed architect George (Gary Lockwood) - but rather the green MG that we observe tooling around the city's streets during a long day fraught with George's commonplace and slightly sad adventures: Seeking out friends willing and able to provide loans, pursuing glimpses of feminine beauty, running away from real and present problems in hopes of stumbling across something fantastical and fulfilling, and above all seeking some semblance of relief from a future that seems both uncertain and crushingly imminent.

George is 26, a slacker, and prime pickings for the draft board. The MG is equipped with a radio that can - without much in the way of interference from George - zero in on news bulletins about the Vietnam war, classical music, and anything recorded by the band Free Spirit (who appear here and wrote songs for the movie).

George's girlfriend Gloria (Alexandra Hay) is an aspiring actress, and though she pays the bills, George pays her career ambitions much less consideration than he does his own - and, given the desultory way he searches for work, he doesn't seem that interested in turning his dreams into gleaming, skyline-enhancing reality. In part it's due to his reluctance to toil for a decade or more on the sorts of pragmatic, uninspired structures that would solidify the practical knowledge of his craft, but one also senses it's down to a certain wispiness of temperament. His father and older brother, both veterans, are solid, stolid, down to earth - and nothing like what George wants to be.

Neither is Gloria, a person with discernible and definite needs. She wants that role in the soap commercials; she wants a baby, and if George won't provide her with one (he doesn't want the responsibility "yet," which in George's case one senses means "ever") then she's willing to hook up with a producer she's recently met and see if he can't answer three or four of her desires in one nice package deal. But when George catches sight - and sound - of a sexy, older French woman (Anouk Aim�e) while hitting up his parklng lot attendance buddy for a few bucks, he finds enough drive and inventiveness to track her down to her place of employment - a "model shop" where men rent cameras and beautiful women by the quarter hour. The experience is about shooting film, but at least the guys come away with a half dozen or so nicely developed prints in the way of mementos, rather than a burning need for penicillin injections.

The French woman works under the name Cecile, but over the course of a couple of encounters George gets closer to the truth about her. Her real name is Lola (as in the title of an earlier Deny flick, to which this might be considered a sort of transitional, somewhat adjacent sequel); she was once married and has a 14-year-old son being raised by relatives in France; she's only resorting to this kind of work to survive. (When George, in a judgmental fit, calls her work demeaning, she puts him in his place by questioning just how it is that unemployment confers any greater dignity.)

George is convinced he's in love with Lola, and he might be on to something. The reason he needs cash is his MG is about to be repossessed; once he lays his hands on the sum he needs, though, he promptly spends it in pursuit of - and then in a gesture of generosity toward - Lola. If, in the end, he has nothing left to hold onto, and no prospect of holding on anyway (he's about to be inducted by the draft board), does it really matter that much? Art, the film seems to insist - literally to its final frame - is more about process than accomplishment. So too, perhaps, are other great ideas such as love, or even freedom.

"Model Shop"
Blu-ray
$29.95
https://www.twilighttimemovies.com/model-shop-blu-ray/