Model Shop

George, an unemployed architect in Los Angeles, is about to be drafted and about to lose his car. One day he follows a woman he sees in the street and finds her working in a place got up as a photography studio. They spend a day moving through the city. Jacques Demy directed; it is his only American film. The woman, Lola, continues the same character from his 1961 film and is played again by Anouk Aimee. The film is a French story picked up years later in Los Angeles. Demy's first choice for the male lead was Harrison Ford, then unknown; the studio refused and the part went to Gary Lockwood. Ford has told the story often since. The real subject is the city. Demy records Los Angeles like a foreigner: petrol stations, freeways, oil derricks and empty streets. The band Spirit wrote the score. It attracted no interest on release and later came to be spoken of as Demy's strangest work. Who it is for: viewers curious about Demy and about Los Angeles at the end of the sixties. Who it is not for: anyone looking for incident; the film wanders through one day.