Model Shop (film)

Model Shop
Directed by	Jacques Demy
Produced by	Jacques Demy
Written by	Jacques Demy
Starring	Anouk Aimée Gary Lockwood Alexandra Hay
Music by	Spirit
Edited by	Walter Thompson
Distributed by	Columbia Pictures
Release date	1969
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$1 million

Model Shop is a 1969 American film by French writer-director Jacques Demy starring Gary Lockwood, Alexandra Hay and Anouk Aimée and featuring a guest appearance by Spirit who also recorded the soundtrack. Demy made Model Shop, which was his first English-language film, following the international success of his film, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

Aimée reprises the title role from Demy's 1960 French-language film Lola.

In Los Angeles in 1969, twenty-six-year old architect George Matthews (Gary Lockwood) is floundering. Unemployed and in debt, the would-be actress Gloria (Alexandra Hay) he lives with is tired of him and his car is due to be repossessed.

Going round friends to scrounge $100 to stave off the finance company, he sees a beautiful foreign woman (Anouk Aimée) in a white convertible and follows her to a mansion in the hills. Ringing up his parents, he learns that his draft notice has arrived and he must report for Army duty next week. For the first time, he comes face-to-face with his own mortality.

In the street he sees the beautiful woman again and follows her. She enters a model shop, a tawdry studio where customers can take erotic photographs, and he books a session with her. But she is uninterested in his attentions. Going home, he finds Gloria has landed a job with a new admirer, who is taking her out for the evening. Obsessed with the enigmatic foreigner, he returns to the model shop and books another session with her. She tells him she is French, named Cécile but working as Lola, and recounts some of her problems. Abandoned by her husband Michel for a female gambler named Jackie Demaistre, she is trying to make enough money to return to France and her child.

In a tender night of drinking and lovemaking at Lola's apartment, George and Lola talk of their failed romances, their hopes, their dashed dreams, philosophy, and mortality. Through their conversation, they each find the willpower to continue living and George gives her the money he borrowed to save his car. The next morning, when George goes home, he finds Gloria packing to leave. Ringing up Lola's apartment, her roommate tells him she now had enough cash for a plane ticket and had flown out early that morning. As they talk, a tow truck outside is removing his car. He says to the girl: "I just wanted to tell her that I love her. I wanted her to know that I was going to begin again. It sounds stupid, I know. But a person can always try."

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