La collectionneuse (The Collector)

The moral tone of these stories (six in total) should not be confused with puritanism. Rohmer is indeed a devout Catholic and a born rationalist, but that does not prevent his philosophical reflections from also exuding sensuality, often being highly witty and containing a healthy dose of self-mockery.

In La Collectionneuse, he observes a group of young people on holiday in Saint-Tropez, where they share a villa close to the sea. Haydée (Haydée Politoff), the ‘collector’ of the title, is a somewhat amoral young woman who sleeps with a different boy every night. Two men, a humourless antique dealer – Adrien (Patrick Bauchau), who is also the film’s narrator – and an introspective artist, Daniel (Daniel Pommereulle), have no intention of being added to her collection and decide to teach her a lesson. For almost the entire film, they play psychological games with one another. Thus, the Machiavellian Adrien initially distances himself from Haydée and claims that she is sleeping with Daniel – the artist friend who tinkers with strange objects – merely to make him jealous. Their erotic strategies, however, rarely yield the desired result. Rohmer observes these self-inflicted entanglements and misunderstandings with exquisite irony.

Adrien, played by Patrick Bauchau, is, just like Bertrand in La Carrière de Suzanne, a sublimated and arguably more self-assured doppelgänger of Rohmer. He unabashedly calls himself a ‘heroic dandy’ and speaks with a self-assurance bordering on arrogance about everything that occupies him: from his morning mood to the play of sunlight on the sea and the underlying rocks. When he is eventually forced to leave without success, he heads to London, where his fiancée is staying on business. In doing so, he adheres neatly to the basic rules of the Contes moraux at the very last moment.
The sun-drenched, frivolous southern atmosphere and the emphatic physicality of the actors – who are often seen in swimwear – make this blend of eroticism and ethics particularly appealing. As a result, this film appears less rigid and less unshakeable than the other variations on the same theme.

The books the characters read either appear so fleetingly on screen that you miss them if you blink, or are deliberately presented as ‘inserts’ through close-ups. Sometimes they offer an intriguing extra insight into the characters’ psychology, interests or state of mind – or perhaps they serve as a subtle form of boasting. For instance, when he is silent, Adrien immerses himself in Rousseau’s Les Oeuvres Complètes, whilst Haydée leafs through a book on German Romanticism.
This was also the first film in which Rohmer introduced a working method he would later employ more frequently. During rehearsals, he shut himself away with his three lead actors – Haydée Politoff, Patrick Bauchau and Daniel Pommereulle – in the villa in question and encouraged them to formulate the dialogue in their own words and actively contribute to the development of their characters. This method, in which Rohmer makes the most of his actors’ creativity and naturalness, lends his films a sense of spontaneity and ‘documentary truth’, in sharp contrast to the artificiality of the fictional plots.

Haydée Politoff is the first of Rohmer’s young actresses with whom Rohmer’s cinema – chaste yet sensual – is associated. The Chinese vase that she deliberately (?) breaks is one of those objects that acquire an extra symbolic value in the film.

- Patrick Duynslaegher