User Reviews

LA COLECTIONNEUSE is Eric Rohmer's first color feature, and along with cinematographer and frequent collaborator Nestor Almendros, he uses a bright palette to maximum advantage in a story that like its time frame, is bursting in warm, vibrant hues that pretty much parallels the equally lightweight plot. Straying habitually close to the same story that makes up what the "Moral Tales" are about, this one concerns a frisky female, Haydee (Haydee Politoff), who captures the attention and equal repulsion of two other young men: Daniel (Daniel Pommereulle), an artist with a penchant for making art that literally cuts its viewers "who aren't sharp", and Adrien (Patrick Bauchau), a young art dealer who is soon to make a lucrative purchase from an American artist.

Haydee is first seen in a frank, objectified way: walking on the beach of Saint Tropez, alone, as the camera lingers on her face (reminiscent of Charlize Theron), her torso, her legs. It's, in a way, Rohmer's mode of possibly depersonalizing his heroine since she remains a murky character with little definition -- one moment submissive, another moment quite take-charge, but always obscure. It's also a way of introducing her carefree way to the viewer; had she been introduced as a buttoned-down, prim female, it would have been clear her role would be that of a woman of stiff mores. But, as we see throughout the movie, Haydee is living in the middle of the swinging Sixties and she could care less about those things. Nor if her partying disturbs the sleep of Adrien or Daniel.

Their share at the summer house in Saint Tropez is anything but placid. The two men are appalled at her behavior and decide not to have sex with Haydee "for her own good." Adrien even decides to dub her "The Collector" -- a moniker that makes up the title of the movie and points at a spiteful machismo because where men can be womanizers and be called studs, women who take on this attitude are sanctioned. He stays at a distance from Haydee as she becomes involved with Daniel. Their liaison, however, becomes rocky and both soon part ways, leaving Haydee and Adrien with an open door to come one step closer. In a shocking move, Adrien offers her to a prospective client in order to secure a Song vase. Surprisingly, she accepts, not without an incident involving the aforementioned vase, which in turn leads Haydee right into Adrien's arms.

Rohmer's movie is not without its "Rohmerisms" where characters introduce themselves with lengthy discussions as to the nature of life, love, attractions, and repulsions. In fact, every character minus Haydee does so, which makes her the more elusive and difficult to describe. Is she just floating along with what the men think they want? Or is she really clueless, a woman who has a simple view on life and who doesn't find any guilt in her actions? Interestingly enough, her "philosophy" is rather close to that of Adrien's girlfriend (every male character in his "Six Moral Tales" arc has a steady) who sees love as universal, indifferent to beauty or ugliness. That Haydee acts upon Adrien's girlfriend's statement says a lot more about who the girlfriend might be, but sheds an accessible light on Haydee.

And anyways, she comes off better than any of the two men, as do the other females of Rohmer's sextet -- Maud, Laura, or Chloe. (It's also interesting that all of the "other women" are mainly brunette and aggressive or assertive in temper, whereas the "ideal" one is frequently blond or passive in character.) Even when objectified, there is a mysterious likability within her that is missing in his two male leads. Adrien is a little hypocritical of his own observant nature and while he openly derides Haydee he also wants her. Daniel is a dark guy in this story and in all of the "Six Moral Tales" collection, not just because of his pain-inducing art, but a veneer of violence just underneath his arrogant demeanor. Maybe, in this story -- as well as all of his others -- Rohmer seems to be the Ultimate Observer, painting a picture in regards to immature men, their attraction to a worldly female, and their decision to remain in a complacent union with another one that can only be there as a Barbie doll.

Prologue 1: A flat-chested French actress walks along a beach. She turns around and walks in the other direction. Art.

Prologue 2: Two French pseudo-intellectuals, with mail-order Philosophy degrees, engage in a discussion about a coffee mug with razor-blades glued to it. The deep thinker on the right suggests it means something. The other deep thinker agrees. Nothing gets the blood of two 60s New Wave hobby-thinkers boiling like a cup with razorblades clumsily attached to it. Art.

Two friends, Adrien and Daniel (the cup gluer), are resting on the French Riviera. They have decided not to do anything, be idle for a while. And when two New Wave French cinema deep thinkers are on vacation you just know it won't be long before they do two things: 1) exchange philosophical musings about the world, and 2) share a woman. Which brings us to the to-and-fro beach-walking floozy from Prologue 1, Haydee. She and another man, lover no.23,783, join Daniel and Adrien. The gal and her loveur hurl pebbles at a group of chickens. Adrien is not amused, but his curiosity is tickled. Art.

The narrator initially wants nothing to do with this chicken-hating harlot; he finds her too base even for his amoral, hedonistic ways (he claims to have high morals in the dating arena, but we know better than to believe him). Haydee has the voice of an 11 year-old boy and just as much below the neck: i.e. you can certainly understand why art-loving men fall for her in their thousands. To be fair, she has a very cute face i.e. not at all boyish – which might just explain why she isn't an instant object of desire for Daniel and Adrien.

Nonetheless, our monotone-voiced narrator soon starts to rationalize the growing number of Haydee-induced erections in his pants by deceiving himself that his growing interest in her is because "she isn't empty- headed like the others". Art.

How he reaches the rather suspicious conclusion that her IQ is higher than a chimp's, I do not know. Her sentences rarely contain more than 3 words. But I guess when you do nothing all day but read Rousseau your judgment tends to get a little clouded. French philosophers will do that to you…

Soon we find out what German Romantics do to the floozy. Rather unconvincingly, she holds a book called "Les Romantiques Allemandes", in spite of the fact that even the average episode of "Asterix the Gaul" must be far too demanding for her. That very day, as if wanting to release her from the boredom of having to spend the whole evening pretending to read a philosophy book, Adrien suggests a night out. Soon he makes his moves, but she plays hard to get. She runs away (sobbingly? laughingly? the editor decided not to make her weird grunts comprehensible to the viewer) straight into the hands of Daniel, with whom she had a brief fling a few days earlier. The two embrace passionately – in spite of the fact that Daniel and Haydee were supposed to be not on good terms. Don't ask me what the hell is going on. I'm just the viewer. Needless to say: art.

Next up is a brief scene in which Adrien shows a 10th-century vase to Haydee. He turns it around so the cameraman can capture its other side too (which looks pretty much the same), and then he flips the vase back to its original position. I'm just glad this wasn't a 15-minute scene. Art.

Later, grumpy Daniel (vaguely resembling David Warner), bangs his right foot against the living-room floor, over and over, like a semi-catatonic lunatic. Haydee dares complain about the annoying noise. Daniel reacts to her with a vicious yet pointless diatribe about beauty and ugliness. Being unusually homely himself, I'm a little surprised that he'd even dare touch the subject. He also mentions the Sun briefly, making some New-Waveian analogy not worth repeating here. Summa sumarum: this entire venomous anti-Haydee tirade occurs just because she rightfully complained about his childish behavior. Daniel should be glad that a cutie like Haydee ever even looked at him – let alone actually agreed to bed him.

Breaking the bliss of this slightly idle trio is an art collector, Sam. He sounds like Darth Vader, and throws in a few exciting comments about the much-touted elephant-based ancient vase. Daniel shows up, and true to his fickle 60s New Wave temperament, starts berating Sam for being an art collector. The rant is mercifully short though, and the message is as simple as it is moronic and pointless: "I hate art collectors, so I refuse to kiss your behind." Was Daniel molested as a child by a similar kind of baritone-voiced art collector, or is he merely as dumb as a doorknob?

Later, Sam decides to berate Adrien for his sloth, while the latter defends himself by trying to rationalize his layabout existence as some form of "higher existence": a typical language-rapist, in the best New Wave tradition.

In the end, we find out that these 80 minutes of New Wave French cinema were about Adrien's attempts to start feeling "independent". Hallelujah.

Rohmer once said that he focused on the "cinema of thoughts rather than actions". So why didn't he just publish books then? Cinema happens to be largely a visual medium. Perhaps someone forgot to tell him… But next to Godard he must be a genius.

Still, LC is a watchable flick, some of the dialog being fairly interesting. On the other hand, I'm not one of those Tabula Rasa viewers who are easily impressed by any thought or conversation deeper than a pub discussion about a Premier League draw. It takes more than coffee- table philosophers to get my adrenaline going

Adrien, the narrator and main character of La Collectionneuse, vacations at a house of a friend and patron in the south of France. He is planning to open an art gallery after years of supporting himself in a murkily defined role in the art scene, based on his connections, his personal charms, and his scheming. He is separated, perhaps permanently, from his girlfriend, a polished model beaming with positivity who doesn't take him altogether seriously. While on vacation, he shares the house with Daniel, an awkward, intense avant-garde artist with a hatred of mediocre society, and a pretty, inarticulate young drifter, Haydee. Adrien wants to center himself in a feeling of solitude in preparation for his gallery opening, but instead becomes increasingly obsessed with Haydee, who is not his type, but whose escapades with other men dent his ego. Neither Adrien nor Daniel find it acceptable to be just another in a long line of mostly mediocre men that the somewhat generic and vague Haydee finds only okay, yet they don't want to be left out either.

The tropical location and good looking leads of the film provide eye candy, but the overall message of the film is sour and bleak. However this is a bleakness and sourness that is enjoyable, revealing a psychological terrain that is realistic rather than filmic. None of the relationships pictured are profound but overall are driven by a need to score points over others or a involuntary desire for acceptance and gratification. Reunion with his girlfriend in London is less a moral triumph of true love, and more a desire for a more satisfactory ego prop.

Most striking is the anti-romance at the heart of the film. Adrien and Haydee are not dissimilar, both of them bohemian outsiders who don't take well to conformity and the 9-to-5 life, both of whom get by on their personal charm and willingness to ingratiate themselves with the more stable. However, far from finding true love together, they never really connect. Haydee's attention drifts from man to man, and Adrien is caught up in posturing to prove that he is "someone". The simple, childlike Haydee with her lack of ambitions and pretenses is not good enough for him in his mind, while to her, he is perverse and feels superior for no reason.

Two of the best moments in the film are the beginning and the end. In the beginning we are presented with Haydee. She is beautiful, young, healthy, walking on a beautiful beach. It is a perfect picture. Only, she is walking back and forth, to nowhere in particular, her face is rather plain, her haircut silly, her expression vague and dissatisfied. She's desirable but there's nothing especially "impressive" about her, hence the dissatisfaction to haunt the protagonist. Then at the end, the protagonist finds himself alone in paradise, freed from bickering. Far from being peaceful, there is a sense it is depressing. One longs to return to the happier days of unhappiness, just as Haydee expressed in her simple and seemingly stupid fashion earlier in the movie, and like the narrator is forced to admit in the end.

This is one of my favorite of the Moral Tales, feeling less talky and ultimately moralizing than most. It's a somewhat "small" film, ultimately about one man's imperfect character and his squabbles with a few others. Nothing much happens and the point seems to take the cheap shot of snarking on the egotist male protagonist. However, still, it's a movie well worth seeing and enjoyable.

Near the start, after protagonist Adrien has failed to convince his girlfriend to come with him to stay at a friend's villa in the south of France, he arrives at said villa and tells us in VO about his intention to spend the summer in quiet, implicitly monkish contemplation. He gazes at the sea, flips through a volume of Rousseau and he and his friend Daniel sit on the lawn wrapped in blankets like hippie sadhus, loftily discussing the discipline of idleness.

And then the villa's third guest, young pretty Haydée, shows up and all this high-minded stuff instantly flies out the window. Adrien goes a little nuts trying to get her to fancy him without ever stooping to liking her back or even being nice to her, and manages in the course of this to screw up his business plans.

The whole thing is like an externalised dramatisation of what happens when someone meditates or otherwise seeks to take the spiritual path: distractions and temptations pour in, the ego runs rampant etc. Like an updated illuminated manuscript. Except, of course, even the meditation here is already pure egotism, a pose, a mark of the character's overweening vanity. The reviewers saying there's nothing going on here are missing the joke. In its low-key, subtle way, it's hilarious, and, though it was only Rohmer's second feature, and though I hugely value his whole career, I think it's his best and it's one of my top three favourite films.

To better understand the critique qoing on here, it helps to know something about Rohmer's process. Even at this early stage, he had an unusual method of script development, interviewing his actors about their own lives and attitudes and then using what he learned to rewrite the script. In this instance, the interviewees playing Adrien and Daniel were Patrick Bauchau, who went on to a Hollywood career, and Daniel Pommereulle. Both were then members of an art group with Phillip Garelle, the director of La Cicatrice Interieur, one of the most extravagantly pretentious films of all time. Bauchau was envied in Paris as a well-off man about town. These guys were radical-chic privileged fops in other words. Bauchau commented later, "Rohmer used the film to take the piss out of us," though he added generously that it was only when his acting career took off that he realised how special it had been to have a director who worked so intensively with his actors and went to such depths.

Still, though its easy to miss it in the film's quietude and beauty (courtesy of cinematographer Nestor Almendros), the piss-take is there and it's acidic. Three moments take us to the heart of it:

In one of the film's prologues, a friend of Daniel's compliments him by comparing him to pre-revolutionary aristocrats who disdained everyone incapable of understanding their aestheticism. Later, Adrien, forcing one of Haydée's boyfriends to leave the villa, casually remarks, "Might is right." And finally, he avers that anyone lacking in beauty should be cast, "into the ovens."

So there you have it. These hippie dandies, far from having anything revolutionary or liberating about them, are operating in the modes of aristocrats and fascists. This is 1967 and Rohmer is already seeing the seeds of the failure of the hippie project. Where Joan Didion in reporting on the San Francisco scene was doubting the viability of a revolutionary movement bereft of ideas and articulacy, Rohmer was pointing out that the standard bearers of the age of Aquarius were spiritually bankrupt. Maybe his examples were particularly egregious, but in the clear friction created from attempting to combine spirituality with hedonism and narcissism, I think Rohmer identifies a fundamental and fatal contradiction in the hippie approach in general.

And it's a measure of the film's greatness that it manages to be so perceptive about its times while also delivering a timeless morality lesson on vanity. Un conte moral indeed.

. . . walking along a beach, obviously trolling for her next male victim, many if not most viewers are hoodwinked into believing that THIS COLLECTOR is that classic film about the wicked water wanton who enticed many men into getting shorn of their family jewels after being entrapped in the surf and lured back to the serial neuterer's raunchily decorated abode. If you are considering making this mistake with THE COLLECTOR (1967), you're in for a big letdown. This talky gabfest is entirely unerotic, as any hint of a sensuous turn is tediously yakked to death. Plato often said that you cannot beat a dead horse, and the same thing applies to strumpets such as H.