When you go to a movie called “The Modelizer,” you tend to assume certain things about your protagonist: that he’ll be a smooth-talking pricelessly well-dressed cad, one who values women too much for certain assets (their looks) and not enough for others (everything else), and that the film will be engineered to give him a comeuppance. All that is true of “The Modelizer.”
What you don’t expect is that the movie, in this case, is going to take all that sexist-swinger-as-master-of-the-universe stuff and put it on steroids. “The Modelizer” is set in Hong Kong, which the movie keeps reminding us is the most expensive city in the world. The hero, Shawn Koo (Byron Mann), is the scion of an outrageously wealthy Chinese real-estate family; they own one-third of the property in the city. Shawn, who sees each of his parents once a month and serves as their company’s managing director (basically a show title, since they control everything), lives a life of carefree jet-set hedonism, dating a different fashion model every week.
Shawn is handsome and charming, but his defining quality is his sleek fortysomething-yet-boyish floppy-haired metrosexual impeccability. We can see that he might be a catch under any circumstances, but the real reason he has so many women to choose from is that Hong Kong, as the film portrays it, is now the sort of glitzy brand mecca to which fashion models flock as if they were aspiring starlets arriving in Los Angeles in the ’40s. Yet most of them don’t have much money, and Hong Kong — say it again — is the most expensive city in the world. (We’re told that a 350-square-foot shoebox apartment costs $8,000 a month in U.S. currency.) So in order to survive, most of the models need to hook up with what the film calls a V.I.P. — a very interested person. In other words, a sugar daddy.
As one of the models explains, “They’re using us. We’re using them.” But what “The Modelizer” presents, and what Shawn, in his richie-rich horndog eagerness, embraces, is an indentured star system where the young women who’ve arrived from Moscow or Stockholm or São Paulo to be models are basically asked to prostitute themselves to survive. This is a sleazy, wretched racket, yet the film is nearly as blithe about it as Shawn is. He knows that he’s buying his girlfriends, but that’s how he grew up, and to him it’s normal. The film presents this as simply the way things are among a certain rarefied sliver of the Hong Kong elite.
If “The Modelizer” showcased all this with a bit of texture, so that we could take it seriously as drama, or if it were an exuberant romantic comedy, like “Crazy Rich Asians” meets “Pretty Woman,” the film might have gotten away with it. But as directed by Keoni Waxman, from a script by the lead actor, Byron Mann (maybe that’s why he spends so much time addressing the audience in winking commentaries), “The Modelizer” feels like a sketchbook version of the movie it could, or should, have been. The film’s attitude toward the demimonde of Hong Kong sugar daddies and the models who pretend to love them boils down to a cheeky and rather thoughtless shrug.
Mann, a good actor, has a clear idea of how he’s going to play Shawn: as an aging party boy who knows all the angles yet has remained weirdly naïve, sealed into his libidinous bubble of crazy rich privilege. He’s got a girlfriend (Dominika Kachlik) who wants to marry him (the feeling is not mutual), as well as a different cover-girl paramour every night, and he acts as if this were all his by divine right. At the nightclub he owns, he celebrates his birthday once a week, guzzling champagne until 4:00 a.m. And, of course, his “success” with women is guaranteed, since he holds all the financial cards. That he’s natty and intelligent and executes all this without a hint of self-awareness is supposed to be somehow beguiling. Yet “The Modelizer,” in its too thinly textured way, falls victim to the imitative fallacy. It’s not just Shawn who’s a modelizer. The movie is modelizing too.
“I’ve never not closed a model with the Maldives,” says Shawn, describing both his favorite getaway spot and his modus operandi. But the woman he’s trying this out on, a model from Brazil named Camila (Rayssa Bratillieri), is having none of it. Shawn is under pressure from several places. His father, the veteran tycoon modelizer Wellington (Kenneth Tsang), who at first seems an ancient creep out of “Boogie Nights” (but turns out to have a heart as gold as his bank account), and his mother, Beatrice (Julia Nickson), the dynastic matriarch who puts up with all of it, are trying to close a giant merger and want Shawn to settle down, because the optics of his lifestyle threaten to scuttle the deal. In addition, he has given shares in a building he owns to Alina (Hana Hrzic), one of his conquests, with no intention of paying her off — but now she wants the money, which she calculates to be $130 million. (She has brought her Russian-mafia-thug brother over to Hong Kong to get it.)
Then there’s Camila, who, in a word, is nice. She’s a simple girl from Brazil (she’s trying to purchase a house for her parents) who doesn’t have it in her vocabulary to be bought. Is it true love between them? Will Shawn change his ways? You know the answers to those questions, but only because you know that the movie requires those answers. Not because there’s anything so organically romantic in how Shawn and Camila connect. “The Modelizer” has the temerity to conclude with a Shawn-running-through-the-airport scene, as if it had suddenly turned into a rom-com from 30 years ago. But the movie should have heeded its own message, which is that you can’t buy love. Guess what? You can’t buy an ending with feeling either.
