Jacques Demy’s first films, from the nineteen-sixties—starting with “Lola” and including the musical melodrama “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”—were among the era’s prime works of stylish and stylized cinema. But in 1968 he made “Model Shop,” his first—and, as it turned out, his only—American film (which I discuss in this clip). In it, Demy did more than revise his sense of style—he put his meticulous craft to the stringent test of documentary filmmaking and, in the process, revised the very idea of cinematic style. The story, set in Los Angeles, is centered on a young man named George who falls in love at first sight with a young (but slightly older and much more worldly and experienced) woman—a French woman nicknamed Lola, played by Anouk Aimée (reprising that character from Demy’s first film)—and tracks her down to the storefront of the title, a quasi-pornographic establishment where men can photograph the models on staff in positions of their choice.
But, to track Lola down, George follows her car throughout the city—and Demy daringly films that pursuit, and a wide range of George’s other jaunts by auto through Los Angeles, in the cinematic interest of showing not George but L.A. The movie is a virtual documentary about the city, a visual love poem to Demy’s new world. In this regard, it seems to foreshadow the work of Sofia Coppola, whose second feature, “Lost in Translation,” features lots of scenes of Americans driving through Tokyo, and who returned the favor to Los Angeles in her fourth, “Somewhere.” That’s the film that most resembles “Model Shop”—even down to its display of kitschy porn-ish performances behind closed doors.
Demy’s Los Angeles trip was cinematically fertile in other ways, too—he went with his wife (now his widow), Agnès Varda. While they were there, and while Demy made “Model Shop,” Varda had wanted to make a movie for a Hollywood studio, too. Instead, she made three other films, including the feature “Lions Love,” which is also a blend of documentary and fiction, and stars the filmmaker Shirley Clarke as herself. Varda—herself a formidable stylist—was already a much more experienced documentary filmmaker; for her, the shock of Los Angeles was more cultural, more political, and more personal.