The subjects of 'La Collectionneuse’ idle away on a French villa above St. Tropez during the summer. The “mind games” they partake in are slower in tempo, with ineffable sensuality drenching the region which seems to float aimlessly. This marks the third and final installment of Eric Rohmer’s Moral Tales, the very first feature length, and color film. It serves as a starting point to frame the rest of his long career.
Eric Rohmer has outlived (1920-2010) most of his fellow directors of the French new wave in terms of age. It is nothing short of astonishing that it was at the age of 47 he released a film encapsulating the effervescence of youth clad in indolence and narcissism. Rohmer’s works can be categorized into three primary groups: Six Moral Tales, Comedies and Proverbs, and Tales of the Four Seasons. As the title suggests, the moral tales focused on romance while ignoring sex and explored it as a topic of discussion. Employing utterly beautiful people in his films, Rohmer made sure to showcase his actors as they indeed spoke in the film about the possibility of ‘caressing’ each other.
The title of the work, “La Collectionneuse,” refers to a female collector (of men, in this case). The story focuses on a young woman named Haydée who is living at the villa with two friends, Adrien and Daniel, who are around ten years her senior. They observe her being courted by a succession of young strangers who drive up to the villa and take her to the fashionable coastal city, only to return her after sunrise. Both men insist that they do not wish to have sexual relations with her, and they talk themselves into an unspoken rivalry to determine who will be the first to give in.
This takes for granted that Haydée can be acquired without much effort, which is certainly not the situation. The story is told by Adrien, and he passes on to us filtered details of Haydée and Daniel that are biased and overly flattering about himself. He is omnipresent in the film, and though he doesn’t get to control what is said, we are free to make judgment for ourselves. His style was to delay or avoid altogether things that need to happen but a more traditional director would have put into the film on clockwork schedule. The Moral Tales showed us that his characters were not doomed to take obvious routes, and kept the option of contemplating the reasons for their actions. They were not always moral, nor was the supposed morality one we would accept.
Ponder these three for a minute. Daniel Pommereulle is the least captivating of the trio. He is a lazy oval man who enjoys donning a kaftan to the beach, smokes a great deal, and drinks even more. He loves boasting about his indolence and is confident of sleeping with Haydée sooner than later. Politoff is a slender lady with a round face and saucy haircut who portrays Haydée – a character aged 20 at the time of filming. She is bold and has a lot of self-confidence while possessing great skills to keep her secrets under wraps. Patrick Bauchau (Adrien) plays the part of a strikingly handsome youth with saucer eyes. For some reason, he co-wrote the lines introducing him as “six feet six with the profile of an eagle.” From what I see, he is only 6’3”, but the first time I spotted him in Telluride, I froze in awe. He must have been in his forties then, but it seemed to me that all his life experiences only augmented the charm and intrigue added to his face. From ‘67 he was New Wave actor, writer and producer and had his role in Rohmer’s Suzanne’s Career (1963) – a short 55-minute film regarded as the second moral tale.
They live life at a slow pace. The men label her a “slut” because they think she sleeps with the constant stream of men who take her out. When an affluent art dealer comes to the villa to check out a vase Adrien is selling, he practically offers her to the old gentleman. The manner in which she manages that makes it clear that she understands far better than Adrien how to deal with such situations.
The villa must be quite close to St. Tropez, but it is still on an untouched hillside and the characters can walk straight down to the ocean. A friend has lent it to them. It is minimally decorated, and as the three of them sit on a veranda or under trees, nature is indeed present in the form of the birds which Rohmer has portrayed in some of his films.
In his narration, Adrien states that he wishes to raise money to open a gallery. He plans for the next month to do as little as possible and does not wish to have Daniel accompany him. He is irritated when Haydée shows up; after all, she was supposed to be a guest of the owner who is not there. So as not to get saddled with a silly younger girl, he sets out on a personal mission to get Haydée and Daniel together. Daniel, sensing his intentions, attempts to thwart him together with Haydée, who keeps her own hopes completely to herself.
Any Rohmer film, including this one, foster in me an inexplicable sense of calm. None of them stresses me out with the possibility of getting my attention with too much or too little dialogue or action. Rather, it is the case that I am put in a position where I am forced to make my own moral choices and a think. Right after this film came his most popular “My Night at Maud's” (1968); this was the first Rohmer most Americans had seen, then came the “wickedly funny” “Claire’s Knee,” an entire film about how far a hero named Jerome would go to find a reason to touch the delicious knee of Claire.
The knee in “La Collectionneuse” appears as touchable as it will ever be. In the opening scenes of “La Collectionneuse”, a voyeuristic camera watches Haydee, clad in a bikini, splashing in the shallow waters. Swimming pools and beaches have always attracted the attention of camera men. The camera’s eye devours her legs, thighs, belly, and breasts in a very literal sense. The diabolical aspect of Rohmer’s camera and his editing is that the viewer is led to want her in a film that items all fulfillment of wishes. One can only guess if such prologues served as the base to plan Claire’s Knee.
As an editor of Cahiers du Cinema, a journal that launched a thousand ships, Rohmer lagged behind the Nouvelle Vague. Although Godard, Truffaut, and Chabrol were already competing in the big leagues, he made contemporaries of his apprentices. In the meantime, through his partnership with Barbet Schroeder, he made the latter’s two shorts in 1963 as his producer-actor alongside The Sign of the Lion in 1959 to little effect. Finally, when the lion roared, the horse-heads of his moving picture about La Collectioneuse came out in 1967. By then, Godard, Resnais, Chabrol, Varda, Truffaut and even Jourdan had established themselves head over heels in the film industry.
The photography in 'La Collectionneuse' was done by Nestor Almedros, who was the Spanish cinematographer for “Days of Heaven” and won an Oscar. His work in “A Student of Today” was his tableau for the first moral tale, and then he continued to collaborate on nine features with him. His approach was far more lush than what Rohmer cared to employ and he preferred contemplating on characters rather than making them go through a set of motions. This style fited seamlessly with Rohmer's approach.
I recall attending the 1969 film festival in New York and watching Rohmer’s, 'My night at Mauds.’ It was the first Rohmer film I ever watched. It was such a relief to watch a movie where the characters actually have a real value system that they express and not just engage in hollow banter. I've been madly infatuated with Rohmer's work ever since.
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