The Model Shop wants you to love again.
"You were dreaming. You said 'Love?!'" a young woman inquires of the man sleeping fitfully in bed next to her. From that opening moment, Jacques Demy's Model Shop mixes together private longing and individual mystery as the essence of people's relationships. Having the girl, Gloria (Alexandra Hay), behold an enigmatic boy reverses the long-standing movie convention that uses women as objects of romantic desire. This young man, George (Gary Lockwood), takes center screen as Demy's surrogate?robustly handsome, socially average yet mired in sexual and spiritual restlessness. Draft-dodging George and Gloria, a struggling actress, don't connect beyond biological instinct. But because that first scene is immediately?extraordinarily?intimate, Demy finds poignance in their awkward shack-up. They are both searching. Like filmgoers sitting side by side?one's eyes open, the other's closed in revery?they're living out the movie of their lives.
Filmed in 1968, Model Shop is being revived this week as part of the Museum of Modern Art's restoration series (it screens June 13 and 19), but it's more than an artifact of that fractious year when American students were caught up in political unrest and student/labor protests also brought France?including the Cannes Film Festival?to a standstill. Demy's film comes back as proof of something at the heart of social protest?the ongoing and eternal quest for love. Demy was mistakenly criticized at the time for ignoring contemporary politics, as if soul-searching were opting out. In truth, Model Shop is the culmination of a primal, cross-cultural, self-reflexive urge among post-WWII youth (including Demy and his peers in the French New Wave) who rebelled through innovation. By quoting or referencing American genre movies, they gave Hollywood archetypes a romantic, political, sometimes existential spin. Godard's Made in U.S.A. could only (though powerfully) imitate American film noir intrigue to vent his European political paranoia; Truffaut never got to Hollywood to direct Bonnie & Clyde as planned (and so settled for its generic evocation in Mississippi Mermaid); but Demy, insisting on love as part of the political consciousness of that era, was the one who actually made the pilgrimage.
Model Shop proves Demy, as much as any May 1968 protestor, was capable of intense, analytic cultural confrontation. Not hung up on the rhetoric of student rebellion, he was attuned to its idealism. As George drives his green MG through the Hollywood hills, he appeals to friends in the midst of releasing their new pop album (it is the 60s group Spirit); seeks out others who publish an alternative newspaper; and gets fixated on images: staring face-to-face at a portrait of New Wave icon Jean-Paul Belmondo and then devoting himself to photography. He shoots an elusive artist's model he'd recently encountered at a gas station, dressed in white and driving a white Mercury convertible. Her name is Lola?played by Anouk Aimee, the heroine of Demy's first movie, who had fallen in love with an American in a white Cadillac and now wanders in the New World. More than fantastic coincidence, George and Lola's meeting is a radical artistic proposition. Demy's life and his "reel life" converge to make his philosophy clear. Demy was not a proponent of escapism; he stayed achingly aware that desire is central to mankind's existence. The fusion of George and Lola expressed the life Demy wanted to live.
To complete the seeker's metaphor: Demy's pursuit of movie-dreams was a journey of faith. As George's tale shows, it is also a journey toward faith?a love pilgrim's progression.
In Model Shop, Demy consummates the fascination with American movies that suffused his masterpieces Lola and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and his refashioned American musical, The Young Girls of Rochefort. Once on hallowed ground, Demy didn't try to capture the place journalistically as Michelangelo Antonioni did in Zabriskie Point or probe the obscure secret of Hollywood romanticism the way movie-buff pastiches routinely do. In his heart (and craft), Demy already knew those secrets too well. Model Shop is a post-masterpiece, elaborating Demy's own expressive vocabulary?making his imagination real, fulfilling that now-forgotten New Wave decree that movies be taken seriously as emotion pictures.
At some point in history it became embarrassing for pop culture to be about love. My guess is that it happened around the time that The Pet Shop Boys' refrain, "There are no more lovers left alive/That's why love has died," lamented the frigidity and devastation wrought by AIDS. Since then, sarcasm and vengeance became the preferred mode of pop expression?in hiphop, grunge, tv's fake-real cop shows (and cop-a-plea reality shows) and especially in movies like Pulp Fiction, where hipsterism and violence took the place of compassion (thus setting the tone for the ensuing decade). You can count the convincing confessions of love that appeared in independent movies: River Phoenix to Keanu Reeves in My Own Private Idaho, Jennifer Jason Leigh's reading the poem "Two-Volume Novel" in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle. And the mainstream love stories?from When Harry Met Sally to The English Patient?are ludicrous and fatuous. I can't think of a convincing mainstream love story since Say Anything and Always. Nobody believes that Neo loves Trinity in The Matrix Reloaded; their coupling is just a pit stop before the next gladiatorial bout.
Love discomforts moviegoers, while an explosion or "good killing" inspires the kewl detachment of adolescent viewers who don't yet know anything about love, loss or sacrifice. (Y Tu Mama Tambien thrilled the haughty and cynical audience that ignored Wild Reeds.) Pop sensibility has changed so much that few filmmakers, critics or audiences will tolerate being reminded that the thing that makes them human is their ability to love. (Surely that's what's behind the media's incredulity about Spielberg: Scoffers don't want to trust the feelings he touches.)
Demy, who died in 1990, fought a lifelong battle against the canard that love was maudlin and the puerile thought that passion ended with orgasm. This belief in the purity of desire was nurtured by the vision of erotic possibility once offered by the movies. Without becoming either infantile or narcissistic, Demy kept his youthful enthusiasm through sheer, intense agape. (That's what Andre Techine acknowledged when he began Wild Reeds with his teenage protagonists running to see Lola as their own sexual awakenings stir.) Exploring this fresh passion through the signs and meanings of the cinema was never considered silly or aberrant in the era when Pop redefined culture's purpose (as visionary rather than commercial). Skeptics were overwhelmed when Demy's idiosyncratic films illuminated what was profound in those American musicals where characters sang out their inner lives and what was True in those Max Ophüls and Josef Von Sternberg films that detailed a character's sexual struggle with almost religious devotion.
Putting those approaches together deftly, Demy achieved his own distinctive buoyancy. No other American-set movie has a color palette as delicate as Model Shop (photographed by Michel Hugo); modern L.A. looks fabled, yet feels absolutely realistic. The softer view lets Demy do what few film artists (until Alan Rudolph) have ever accomplished: grapple with romance as the substance of everyday life. Watching George's leisurely urban love hunt (seeing him respond to lovers as well as to life options) is like feeling dirt on your fingertips and water on your tongue?a succession of basic sensations in each dreamlike scene.
In this film about a discontented young American, Demy-the-fantasist shows what folklorists knew: that people lived as they loved?even if the ideal is only attainable in their dreams. Crossing an ocean and a continent to make Model Shop in Hollywood, Demy enjoyed the community of upcoming young cineastes such as genre-adept Walter Hill. He collaborated on Model Shop's English-language screenplay with Adrien Joyce (the screen name for Carole Eastman) who later extended its plot into Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces. Note that George and Gloria's love shack stands next to a field of oil derricks?foreshadowing Five Easy Pieces while characterizing the sense of dislocation felt at that time by young Americans ironically alienated from labor and the social structures they've inherited. The setting is appropriately distanced from Hollywood studios.
Demy understood Los Angeles existentially as the place where movie dreams (romantic ideology) are manufactured. He didn't need to show Hollywood's actual apparatus any more than Hal Ashby would in Shampoo. The apparatus is in George's head; his fantasies, while on the fringes of Hollywood, constitute actual moral and social dilemmas. Like Roland Cassard, the agonizing young hero of Lola, George must decide how to live his life?with or without love.
In Jacquot de Nantes, the commemorative documentary by Demy's widow Agnes Varda, it was revealed that one of the finalists for the role of George was the young Harrison Ford. Instead, Demy cast Gary Lockwood (in 1968, a star of network tv and Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey). Today the choice seems apposite; Lockwood is a Demy type (like Lola's Marc Michel and Umbrella's Nino Castelnuovo). Sensitive, brooding, effortlessly sensual in black t-shirt and blue jeans, his pelvis peeks out as in the new millennial fashion. Lockwood's callow performance makes sexuality seem timelessly innocent. He follows Lola as a muse and after cruising around L.A., seeing the drab company town with new purpose, he is roused to exclaim "I wanted to build something right then," recalling his dream of being an architect. Thus, George's spiritual crisis is also an artistic one. This aspiration to create is a noble feeling, but eventually George trails Lola to a photography studio where she poses by-the-clock for men who want to take naughty snapshots of women.
For Demy, the Lola figure has always borne tragedy heroically. Anouk Aimee's masklike face imperceptibly shifts from glee to sadness; she can be photographed?and studied?endlessly. When dejected or disgraced, her charm is subject to men's degradation. (George goes through a portfolio of Lola portraits like a flipbook of cinema's female objectification.)
Despite the trenchant suggestion of prostitution, Demy's understanding and sympathy for romantic and sexual life goes against social convention. A critic claimed that Demy justified Lola's illusions, not accepting her as a woman of faith. Fact is, Saint Lola is a survivor and she always, honestly, expresses her spiritual conflict?to Roland and now to George. Her wisdom transforms the sordidness of do-it-yourself porn. (Which, Demy knew, is what most movies that traduce romance amount to.) Through Lola's beneficence, Demy links even this form of art-making to the earlier instances of a rock album and underground newspaper?all desperate or whimsical gestures of communication and desire.
George and Lola's summit meeting presents an unforgettable flirtation between innocence and experience. The longing George feels compelled to confess is not only personal but reveals the heart of the era's distress: "I'm afraid of death," he says?as a potential Vietnam draft-dodger and a man questioning his life's purpose. Living in his head and in his time, George might be Demy's most poignant protagonist. Too complex to be understood in the midst of 60s turmoil, George's dilemma anticipated the tortured supplicants of Eyes Wide Shut and the erogenic loners of the current Friday Night. Unlike misanthropic Kubrick and dispassionate Claire Denis, Demy pioneered the lyricism and tension of characters seeking to fit private imaginings into their public circumstances. A truly modern vision.
Believing in love, Demy was undistracted by sex, though he maintained the pop artist's knack for delighting in sexuality. Simply put, this makes Demy's movies unlike anyone else's. He sustains the core cinematic belief (articulated by Andre Bazin and practiced by the French New Wave) that the only thing more beautiful than life itself is its reflection in art. That's a brave stand these days?this summer?when movies are no longer expected to be about life. George's insistence to Lola ("Love me like a child") begs for the acceptance of his purest self, for the realization of his deepest dream. Dare I say it? His wish is Demy's prayer.
Some people thought these ideas were sappy even while Demy was alive. When George returns to Gloria, the purity of Model Shop's love quest outlives cynical fashion (listen closely for Gloria's response). My bet (my prayer) is that the shock of seeing romance so profoundly understood in Model Shop might incite a richer, deeper longing in today's filmgoers. It was a different film culture in 1968 that had room for wise sentiment. Model Shop was advertised with a poster depicting a man's hand grasping toward a woman's, their fingers outstretched like the classic detail of Adam reaching toward God in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel fresco. It's more than 20 years since E.T. borrowed the same motif; imagine an '03 film ad using an art reference! Imagine a new movie unashamed of spiritual desire? Going back to Model Shop could help modern movies rediscover love.