Moviegoer Diary: Model Shop, Taxidermia

MODEL SHOP

Plot In A Nutshell
Jacques Demy’s 1969 film about a dissatisfied man (Gary Lockwood) who has a bittersweet one-day affair with a French divorcée (Anouk Aimée) working as a “model” in Los Angeles.

Thoughts
There’s a scene in David Byrne’s movie True Stories in which Byrne, who serves as the film’s onscreen narrator, gestures toward the bland suburban streets surrounding him and says something like, “Just look at these houses — how can anyone say they aren’t beautiful?”

I’ve never been sure how to take that comment — does Byrne genuinely find beauty in this environment, which seems like the definition of, if not ugliness, then at least sterile banality? Or is he playing a deconstructionist game, applying the word “beautiful” to objects that clearly don’t deserve it, and seeing whether that changes the word’s definition?

There’s a similar moment in Jacques Demy’s Model Shop in which Gary Lockwood — playing an idealistic architect, no less — tells Anouk Aimée that he doesn’t care what anybody says, as far as he's concerned, Los Angeles is a beautiful city. Lockwood is clearly serving as Demy’s mouthpiece, but unlike Byrne, we never doubt Demy’s sincerity — even though Demy does absolutely nothing to make Los Angeles look beautiful. It’s a city of ugly streets and billboards, clogged with cars and visual junk. Lockwood lives way on the outskirts of town in a house with some kind of oil derrick in the front yard! And yet Model Shop still makes Los Angeles seem like a city full of possibility. Lockwood spends the entire day driving aimlessly around, and it seems as though he discovers exciting adventures and interesting people around every corner.

Plus, he’s got a great car — a nifty little dark green roadster that he bought on impulse a few months ago, and which is going to get repossessed by the end of the day unless he can find $100. For a while, that quest to find $100 seems like it’ll be the plot of the film, but in a delightful surprise, Lockwood has no trouble at all getting his hands on the cash — he has a musician friend who’s happy to give him the money — and the real plot of the film begins when Lockwood, a little creepily, follows an intriguing-looking older woman to the place where she works. The business turns out to be the “model shop” of the title — sort of a chaste version of a massage parlour, where customers pay a fee to photograph pretty girls in a variety of poses and costumes. (Did businesses like this ever really exist? It’s kind of a brilliant idea — it’s like a brothel or a strip club for guys who find brothels and strip clubs too sleazy.)

Lockwood takes a few pictures of Aimée, but you get the feeling that sex isn’t quite what’s on his mind. After all, he’s already living with a pretty little blonde (Alexandra Hay) who in the opening scene bustles about their cute little house in a flirty little floral bra and panties, fixing breakfast and just looking delectable. But Hay isn’t really giving him what he wants either. And so he drives around Los Angeles — partly hoping to figure out what he wants, and partly trying to empty his head of any thoughts at all. He almost takes a job at an alternative newspaper, which I was excited to see. And then, the Vietnam War, a subtle background presence throughout the film, intrudes upon Lockwood’s life in a way that seems sudden yet inevitable.

I’ve only seen three Jacques Demy movies now — the others are The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, of course, and The Young Girls of Rochefort, which is my all-time favourite musical. I’ve absolutely adored all three of them, and I wonder how many more I have to see before I start thinking of Demy as one of my all-time favourite directors. I’ll certainly have to watch Lola next, which is the film in which Anouk Aimée originated the character she plays in Model Shop.

I get the feeling Model Shop isn’t all that highly regarded by critics — I seem to recall Thom Anderson condescending to its French tourist’s-eye view of the city in Los Angeles Plays Itself — but I was totally captivated by it. It was made by Columbia Pictures, who also made The Swimmer around the same time; apparently there was an executive there who had a soft spot for arty tales of men who decide to spent the entire day drifting aimlessly around the neighbourhood.

Stray Observation
Fred Willard, of all people, pops up in a dialogue-free role as the gas station attendant who cleans Gary Lockwood's windshield.



RATING: 5/5

* * * * *

TAXIDERMIA

Plot In A Nutshell
Hungarian director Györgi Pálfi’s blackly humourous film about three generations of men: a long-suffering military orderly, a competitive speed eater, and a depressed taxidermist.

Thoughts
I was expecting much worse.

In my ongoing quest to sample the most outré, shocking cinematic content I can find — a quest that has resulted in recent Moviegoer Diary viewings of Saló, Caligula, Martyrs, and Inside — I decided to give Taxidermia a spin, having read a few reviews describing it as the most disgusting thing currently viewable on the nation’s movie screens.

It’s certainly not a movie I’d ever recommend to my parents, but I don’t know if jaded “mondo movie” aficionados will be too fazed by it either. The hardest scene for me to watch takes place after a competitive eating match — the competitors gather around a large vat into which they vomit up the gallons of soup they just ingested in order to prepare for the next round. I really hate the idea of vomiting, and I had to watch this bit through squinted eyes. At the same time, the scene is undeniably a superb technical achievement — Pálfi does it in a single, unbroken shot, with two of the characters having a fairly lengthy dialogue exchange amidst all the upchucking. I truly have no idea how Pálfi accomplished this absolutely disgusting sequence. (Could the vomit be CGI?) It’s right up there with the “Rectum” sequence from Irréversible in the pantheon of astonishing visual effects achievements that I never want to see ever again.

Taxidermia is a curious mix of visual sophistication and fleshy debasement. Pálfi takes pains to remind us that every character we see is essentially a piece of meat — some may have more feelings than others, but we’re all squishy bags of fat and organs when you come right down to it. And all we do all day long is emit semen, sweat, blood, shit, piss, and vomit. It’s kind of a limited philosophical worldview, to be sure, but Pálfi definitely takes each of the three episodes that make up the film into some peculiar new places.

It’s a film about hunger, about people who stuff themselves silly (with food, with sex) and who never, ever feel full. It’s the curse of having a body, Pálfi seems to be saying, and it’s probably significant that the one character who discovers true happiness is the one who... well, I don’t want to spoil it, but let’s just say he manages to divest himself of his physicality in a very extreme way.

Not by vomiting, though, thank God.



RATING: 3/5