A Colecionadora

In The Collector, the first feature-length film of the Six Moral Tales series, mind-games, strategies, and overt manipulation thwart the possibility of satisfying relationships. The 54-minute film is beautifully photographed and has an elegance, charm, and wit that bears favorable comparison with his more acclaimed works. Adrien (Patrick Bauchau), an art dealer, and Daniel (Daniel Pommereulle), a painter spend the summer in a house on the French Riviera. Also vacationing there is Haydee (Haydee Politoff), an elegant but rather aloof young woman who sleeps with many boys in the area and has earned the title of "collectionneuse", a collector of men. Adrien, smug and self-centered in a charming sort of way, is interested in Haydee but tells himself that her promiscuity is a trick for him to seduce her and he refuses.

The summer turns into a love triangle with Adrien convincing Daniel to pursue Haydee to ease the pressure of his own conflict between his rationalizing intellect and his passions. In the moral scheme of things, Haydee may represent the sexual revolution of the 60s and Adrien that of traditional morality, yet the film takes no sides, presenting the issues without judging the characters and giving us much to think about. The Collector is perhaps the most philosophical of the six but in the end the pursuit without passion leads to a feeling of emptiness and missed opportunities. Like most of Rohmer's films, there are no peak dramatic moments or confrontations, just everyday life elevated into art.

It's hard to explain what is the Rohmer's cinema. In his movies you can't find heroes, incredible adventures or great action sequences. Everything happens inside the mind of the characters, and the most important aspect is the psychology of them.

La Collectioneuse is simply the masterpiece of Rohmer.

The plot is very simple: two boys and one girl in their friend's house in St.Tropez. That's all. There are not incredible events that happen, they simply LIVE there. It's an typical situation of Rohmer who likes to study the evolution of love triangles, in different situations. The explanation of the development steps, made by the usual interior voice of the main character (Adrien), it's incredibly accurate and likely. It's fantastic that sometimes Adrien's thoughts look at first to be absurd, but even in this case if we reflect a bit to that we can realize that it's true, that really in similar cases we have non-sense thoughts like those. In this way, Rohmer is unique: the psycho-evolution of the characters is incredibly real. Dialogs, internal and not, are superb and the directing essential.

Rohmer shows us how it's possible to make a masterpiece with a ridiculous budget, and how an intellectual movie can be also enjoyable and not so heavy.

The vote, of course, can't be different by 10 out of 10.

Eric Rohmer's movies are, it seems almost without exception, slow- burners that reward those with the patience to sit through them, preferably more than once in some cases, and think about whats being said as much as whats being shown. This, his first feature in colour requires considerable thought on the part of the viewer, serving up nothing in the way of dramatic excitement and featuring three loathsome main characters who's morals are very in keeping with the era of late- 60s self satisfaction and hedonistic excess. Not that the hedonism is very wild. Jimi Hendrix does not blast from the simple record player that sits near a chair and provides the only music in the film. No one smokes anything illegal or pops any pills, talks of Indian mystics or goes in for meditation. But there is the very liberated (nowadays we'd say reckless) attitude to casual sex, although we don't see very much; the relaxed tangle of naked legs half glimpsed through one doorway, a brief an unrevealing shot of the main protagonist, the disturbingly young looking Haydee, quietly enjoying the intimate attention of another one-night-stand. Otherwise it's all hints and the more effective for that. Haydee is the very image of a swinging-sixties bed hopper. Young, slender, independent, cool and seemingly amoral she wrecks the plans of Adrian, an art dealer with time on his hands, when he finds her resident in a borrowed holiday villa at which he intends to devote himself to doing nothing at all for a few weeks while his girlfriend is in London. Haydee's noisy night-time frolics disturb his sleep and offend his self- declared sense of morality and the added presence in the house of his lazy, grumpy painter-friend Daniel sets up a spiralling tension between them all. But this is pure Rohmer and that tension manifests itself not in fist-fights, broken furniture, tearful confessions and blood-letting, but insults, low-key/nigh-brow arguments, teasing, sniping and political manoeuvring. In fact the more one thinks about the film, and it's one of those movies that does hang around long after the credits, the more one realises it's actually rather more like real-life, certainly as most of us endure it from time to time, than the over-dramatic offerings we are used to from mainstream movie-makers. Haydee maybe cute, Adrien describes himself as handsome and the setting is idyllic but you really wouldn't like to be on holiday with these unsympathetic characters. Observing their antics from without is one thing but to be part of it would be a nightmare! Oddly with it's morality so perfectly fixed in it's own time, this seems far more like a film from the 1970s. Something in it's look and after-the-party sense of deflation and disenchantment fits in with that later decade. Seeing it without knowing the release date you might well guess at 1972 or even later. If Godard's BANDE A PARTE is set in a Swinging-Sixties that hasn't yet arrived, Rohmer's film portrays one that has already left the building, although it's after-effects continue to create a problem. It all sounds somewhat depressing on paper and to some extent it is! It's not an easy film but if you give it time and maybe second look, you might well find there is more to this outwardly simple tale than you thought.

Art dealer, in need of serenity, finds that the holiday villa is shared by a hedonistic young woman. He becomes obsessed with ignoring her and pretends to himself that she wants to seduce him while he remains unaffected. The holiday thus turns into a love triangle between the indifferent but flirtatious girl, the man's unacknowledged desire, and his incessant, pompous self-rationalizations (the best cinematic use of voice-over EVER!). A sunny, witty, and deeply ironic "moral tale" that explores, like most of Rohmer's work, the uneasy vacillation between intellect and eroticism.

Two tired cliches are that sex destroys friendships and that men and women can never really be friends and no-one chronicled these two sayings better than Eric Rohmer who made it his life's work to explore the psychological battles that we call courtship. In doing so he became, perhaps, the cinema's greatest director of women. Let's forget for a moment that he divided his films into series, (Six Moral Tales, for example, of which "La Collectionneuse" is one), and concentrate on the film at hand.

"La Collectionneuse" is very simple and very straightforward. Two male friends spend a summer sharing a villa in the south of France. There is another occupant, a slightly younger woman who sleeps around and it is she the men christen the collector since she 'collects' men wherever she goes. They, of course, consider themselves moral but they are also intellectuals and perhaps womanisers, too. They want to collect the girl; they want the girl to collect them.

Like all of Rohmer's best work this is a film of talk rather than action. Rohmer doesn't film love scenes or sex scenes; once his male and female characters enter the bedroom he loses interest. It's the chase and not the catch he cares about and whether men and women really can be friends as well as lovers. He takes his subjects seriously but he also likes to have fun at their expense and like so many of his films "La Collectionneuse" will have you chuckling if not exactly laughing out loud.

In his later films it was usually the women who took the lead but here it is Adrien, (a superb Patrick Bauchau), who acts as our narrator, guiding us through the moral maze but then all three players are excellent. This may be a minor Rohmer film but minor only in the way a short story is considered minor when compared to a novel. Personally I think "La Collectionneuse" is a Rohmer crying out for your collection.