Monthly Archives: May 2023

  • La collectionneuse

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Eric Rohmer (1967)

    Short prologues introduce each of the three main characters in turn – Haydée (Haydée Politoff), Daniel (Daniel Pommereulle) and finally Adrien (Patrick Bauchau).  They’re far from voluble at this early stage.  The first prologue is wordless:  Haydée, the youngest of the trio – hardly out of her teens, simply stands on a Mediterranean shore in a bikini; the camera observes her increasingly closely.  The two men, in their late twenties, are both in conversation but their interlocutors do most of the talking.  Daniel is an avant-garde artist; an unnamed older man (Alan Jouffroy) explains his admiration for Daniel’s latest work despite cutting a finger on the razor blades that encase the piece.  Art collector and dealer Adrien, in the company of his fashion model fiancée Carole (Mijanou Bardot) and her pal (Annik Morice), listens to the latter (also unnamed) expound on why she could never be friends with someone she considered ugly.  Thanks to the good-looking young people that dominate the screen from the start, the elitism of physical beauty imposes itself as a persistent, though subsequently unspoken, theme of Eric Rohmer’s La collectionneuse[1].  But the principals’ verbal reserve in the prologues is not a sign of things to come.  Like Rohmer’s other ‘moral tales’ – this is chronologically the third of the six – the film has plenty to say.

    Although Haydée is vital to the film and Daniel has a sizeable part in it, Adrien is its narrator and protagonist.  That gives La collectionneuse something else in common with the three Rohmer tales that would follow (I’ve still not seen the two preceding ones):  each of My Night with Maud (1969), Claire’s Knee (1970) and Love in the Afternoon (1972) has a young(ish) man as its central consciousness, with his strong, often troubled sexual feelings for a woman or women the story’s motor.   Adrien emerges as the lead character even before the end of ‘his’ prologue.  This is longer than the other two, moving on, after her friend has departed the scene, to a discussion between Carole and Adrien.  She’s about to leave France for London on a five-week modelling assignment and encourages Adrien to come too but he says no.  He wants to open his own art gallery and negotiations with a potential partner are at an important stage.  Adrien nevertheless accepts an invitation to spend the next month in the house of Rodolphe, a rich friend, in St Tropez.  Rodolphe won’t be there but Daniel, an old friend of Adrien’s, will be.  On arrival, Adrien learns from Daniel there’s already another house guest – Haydée.  Rodolphe first brought her there to sleep with him.  Now she brings boys back to the place to sleep with her.

    Her presence immediately irritates Adrien, who’s determined to have a relaxing break just reading and swimming – so determined that relaxation is bound not to happen (especially since he’s still preoccupied with the gallery project).  His voiceover narration nevertheless confirms the straightforward daily routine to which Adrien commits at the start of his stay – get up early for a first dip in the sea, and so on.  Daniel, though less explicitly organised, also wants to spend his time at leisure and not to be bothered with sexual distractions.  Clearing the decks for a chill-out is only achieved, however, through proactive masculine one-upmanship:  the two friends join forces to humiliate (with words) Haydée’s latest lover, Charlie (Dennis Berry), and send him packing – to the evident amusement of Haydée, who rejects Charlie’s suggestion that she leave with him.

    Haydée has to be the title character according to the film’s French name although there are collectioneurs in evidence too – not just Adrien himself but also the crass and wealthy American Sam (Seymour Hertzberg[2]), Adrien’s prospective gallery partner.  It’s Adrien and Daniel, rather than Rohmer, who label – brand – Haydée ‘a collector’ of men, which upsets her and which she vigorously denies.  For a while, Haydée continues to go out each evening although she now returns unaccompanied.  One night, she asks Adrien to give her a lift into town.  He obliges but, after passing time there with another young woman and man, Haydée and Adrien come back to Rodolphe’s place together.  The several exchanges between them in the house and on the beach – even when conversational, these are sensually charged – make clear the mutual attraction between them but Adrien, in acknowledging that he likes Haydée, claims it would be against his principles to have sex with her, even though it’s he who has taken the seductive lead.

    Adrien recommends she sleep with Daniel instead and that’s what happens until Daniel decides he’s had enough of Haydée and St Tropez.  (Sam enters the story just as Daniel prepares to leave it:  his parting shot is to insult Sam and thereby embarrass Adrien.)  The characterisation of Haydée illustrates La collectionneuse’s impressive complexity and Haydée Politoff, though she doesn’t suggest a major acting talent, is suitably polymorphous in the role.  Her affectless quality gives Haydée an inscrutable, heartless aspect yet Politoff also registers, without displaying undue emotion, Haydée’s capacity to feel hurt.  The girl tantalises men and is unkindly exploited by them.

    Adrien is close kin to the leading men in Rohmer’s next three films; each starts off seemingly sure what he wants romantically but is distracted from it.  Jean-Louis in My Night with Maud has made his choice of bride; Jérôme in Claire’s Knee is, like Adrien, engaged to be married (and on a month’s away-from-it-all vacation); Frédéric in Love in the Afternoon is a husband and father.  Frédéric’s minutely defined and scrupulously observed daily routine echo Adrien’s attitude at the start of his stay in St Tropez but the latter is a more extensive control freak than any of his contes moraux successors.  After Daniel’s departure, Adrien sets up a liaison between Sam and Haydée – partly to console her after being dumped by Daniel, partly for his own purposes and to amuse himself.  When his voiceover describes his irritation at seeing Haydée and Sam perform with relish the roles that Adrien has assigned them, the admission seems to refer to more than this particular incident.  Adrien repeatedly tries to control people and events.  He makes things happen that leave him feeling less in control.

    The Belgian actor Patrick Bauchau narrates with plenty of wit but is even better at showing in his face and movement what’s going on in the protagonist’s mind (which is crucial to Rohmer’s purposes in his moral tales:  he told Film Quarterly in 1971 that he considered a moraliste to be ‘someone … interested in the description of what goes on inside man … concerned with states of mind and feelings’).  Bauchau also generates plenty of humour in the frequent changes of mind of hard-to-like yet engaging Adrien.  I don’t recall seeing Bauchau before and was left wondering what else he’d done:  the answer is a lot – 150 acting credits (including plenty of television) on IMDb.  His first two screen appearances were both in Rohmer films – Suzanne’s Career (1963), which is the second conte moral, then La collectionneuse.  Now eighty-four, Bauchau is still working; he and Mijanou Bardot (Brigitte’s younger sister), who plays Carole here, have been married for more than sixty years.

    Patrick Bauchau is a main, but not the only, reason why I enjoyed La collectionneuse at least as much as My Night with Maud and more than either Claire’s Knee or Love in the Afternoon.  As in Maud, the welter of introspective narration and exchange of epigrams are more than super-literate decoration: they have dramatic purpose.  The often combative repartee (Rohmer shared the screenplay credit with his three main actors) creates or reinforces tensions between the characters.   There are some good tense silences too, typically when one person is reading a book – until another interrupts the reading.  Although the first prologue may be said to objectify scantily-clad Haydée, La collectionneuse turns out not to have the gender bias – in favour of exposed female flesh – that’s hard to ignore in later Rohmer, especially Love in the Afternoon.  Numerous swimming and sunbathing scenes involving Adrien and Haydée make for a relative gender balance – and make it easier to appreciate the beauty of both actors concerned.  The effect of heat and sun on body and mood is wonderfully visualised.  This film, the first that Rohmer shot in colour, was also the start of his collaboration with Nestor Almendros as cinematographer.

    Adrien’s hopes of opening a gallery may not be satisfied in the course of La collectionneuse but it does cover a good deal of moral (at least in the Rohmer sense of the word) ground in only eighty-three minutes.  And Adrien does succeed in selling Sam a Song dynasty vase – an object that might be described as priceless were it not that Sam writes Adrien a cheque.  Like nearly all screen vases, this one doesn’t get out of the film in one piece.  It perches on a table in Sam’s villa, waiting to be knocked off its perch, and shattered, by careless Haydée.  Even a slap to her face from Sam hardly dents her insouciance:  she can’t understand why Adrien makes such a fuss when he’s already been paid for the vase.

    In the closing stages, Adrien decides to enjoy the last week of his holiday having a fling with Haydée.  At this point, his voiceover acknowledges that the tale he’s been telling us is merely the story of his shifting views and decisions – and even this latest decision proves short-lived.  As he and Haydée drive back to Rodolphe’s place, they encounter a car containing two of the other men she’s been with during her time in St Tropez.  Haydée walks over to talk to them and seems tempted by their invitation to join them on the road to Italy.  Adrien loses patience and drives off alone.  Back at the house, he can now devote his time to swimming and reading as he always wanted.  Or thought he did:  the film’s closing scene sees him on the telephone to the airport, asking the time of the next flight to London, where Carole still will be.

    14 May 2023

    [1] I’ll give the film its French title throughout to distinguish it clearly from William Wyler’s The Collector (1965).

    [2] This is the actor’s name according to Wikipedia and IMDb cast lists.  He was actually Eugene Archer, a film critic for the New York Times.

  • Simon and Laura

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Muriel Box (1955)

    Peter Finch’s last and (alas) probably most famous role was in Network (1976), a satirical, hysterical anti-TV polemic produced in Hollywood, directed by Sidney Lumet and (over)written by Paddy Chayefsky.  Twenty years earlier, in his first leading role for the Rank Organisation and during the infancy of television as a widespread centre of attention in British living rooms, Finch co-starred with Kay Kendall in this milder, cosier Pinewood lampoon of the upstart medium’s ethos and technical crudity.  Although its chief target was, necessarily, the BBC, the launch of ITV was imminent when the picture started shooting in early June 1955:  the country’s second channel began broadcasting on 22 September that year, exactly two months before Simon and Laura opened.  As a comedy, the film is strenuous, even tiresome, but it gives an interesting insight into contemporary cinema’s anxiety about the growing popularity of the box.  The director’s surname is a nice irony.

    Contemporary British theatre must have been anxious too because Simon and Laura started life on stage and ran in the West End for six months immediately before the film, adapted from Alan Melville’s play by Peter Blackmore, went into production.  Bright-spark BBC producer David Prentice (Ian Carmichael) has a wizard idea for a new crowd-pleaser:  a series, with an episode to air live each evening, that, in David’s words, ‘will mirror the lives of an ordinary, happily married husband and wife’ – the ordinary pair to be played by a real-life, happily married celebrity couple.  The Controller of Television (Richard Wattis) – aka CT (the many acronyms in use at the BBC generate too many acronym jokes in Blackmore’s script) – objects that the latter don’t exist but David affably disagrees: there’s the Attenboroughs and the Oliviers although ‘I think we can do better than that’ (this gives a flavour of the film’s arch lèse-majesté humour).  David proposes instead Simon and Laura Foster – ‘They’ve been married for years.  Both of them have been stars for as long as I can remember.  And, sir, absolutely devoted to one another’.  Muriel Box promptly cuts to the Fosters in the middle of a full-scale domestic – Laura (Kendall) hurls a plate at Simon (Finch) as he leaves the room and locks her inside.  He then asks his butler-cum-factotum, Wilson (Maurice Denham), to buy him a one-way train ticket to Leicester.  Simon is appropriating, we gather not for the first time, a traditionally female response to marital discord:  he’s going home to mother.

    The couple’s agent, Bernie Burton (Hubert Gregg), hotfoots it to St Pancras and stops Simon just as he’s about to board the train to Leicester.  At first both Fosters, whose claim to fame is as stage performers, pooh-pooh the BBC offer but it turns out their star status is as shaky as their marriage; when Bernie points out they need the work, they think again.  And once ‘Simon and Laura’ the TV programme gets underway, Simon and Laura the film puts the turbulence of the couple’s actual relationship on the back burner until the plot needs it to resume a major role.  The new show attracts a huge audience; the title characters are so celebrated that their names and faces are soon advertising this and that in magazines and on double-decker buses.  (I was maybe wrong to be surprised that performers under contract to the BBC in the 1950s were allowed to do this but I couldn’t help wondering if this was one of the details in the film that anticipated the arrival of commercial television.)  The TV series cast also includes – also supposedly as themselves – not just butler Wilson, himself an ex-thespian, but also the Fosters’ cook, Jessie (Thora Hird), who is spotted by set dresser Adrian Lee (Alan Wheatley) when he visits their home to get décor ideas for the show:  Jessie is ‘absolute heaven’, says Adrian, adding, more ambiguously, ‘I’ve never seen a face like it’.  David Prentice becomes the blue-eyed boy of Lime Grove studios.  Janet Honeyman (Muriel Pavlow), the ‘Simon and Laura’ scriptwriter, is the literally blue-eyed girl who carries a torch for David.

    Everything’s going great guns until it isn’t.  Worried that the leading man and lady’s childlessness will soon limit their family viewing appeal, CT insists that a young boy character be drafted in – Simon and Laura’s visiting nephew, who then turns into their adopted son:  Timothy (Clive Parritt) is a card on camera and a little monster off it.  Janet overhears David on the phone to Laura and gets the wrong idea.  Laura suspects Simon, with form as a womaniser, of playing away with Janet.  Simon finds out that Laura has spent a long evening at David’s flat.  The plot’s thickening is a means of distracting attention from Simon and Laura’s distinctly scattershot satirical approach but doesn’t disguise it entirely.  The film depends heavily on the phony idealisation of the TV version of the couple’s relationship:  that the show is a hit seems meant to demonstrate that people are content with this illusion until CT is alarmed by a rash of reviews complaining that the perfect marriage is boring.  A Christmas episode, broadcast from the Fosters’ actual home, descends into chaos:  off-screen hostilities intrude onto the set, culminating in a set-to between Simon and Laura and more serious blows exchanged by David and Simon; naughty Timothy flicks a switch to ensure the programme stays on air.  The resulting press reviews are enthusiastic and a shot in the arm to the show.  The longer the film goes on, the more it seems to deplore the fickleness of public opinion as much as television’s built-in opportunism – and it’s a bit rich for a piece of mainstream cinema to laugh at TV integrity being inevitably compromised by an eye on viewing figures.  Everything’s finally resolved happily in Simon and Laura – the title characters realise they’re made for each other, David decides he loves Janet back, even Timothy lends a hand to clear up the romantic misunderstandings – because the film-makers know better than not to keep their audience happy.

    It’s true this small-screen-baiting, although based in real nervousness about cinema attendances, is often tongue in cheek.  But the film strikes what are, at least in long retrospect, some jarring notes.  Every so often, Muriel Box shows a ‘typical’ family watching ‘Simon and Laura’ – mum (Marianne Stone), dad (Cyril Chamberlain), their two children (uncredited) and gran (Muriel George).  The trouble is, these are ‘typical’ TV viewers because they’re also working-class (Cockneys).  When the first episode goes out, gran assumes it’ll be dull and asks what time the boxing’s on; in fact, her tastes are pretty constant – as the Christmas episode mayhem unfolds, she’s yelling, ‘Go on, ‘it ‘im, champ!’  The paterfamilias, chided by his wife for siding with Simon when he raises his hand to Laura, tells her, ‘That’s the only way to treat ’em’; she replies, ‘I’d like to see you try it’, and he does.  The film reasonably pokes fun at Simon and Laura’s showbiz egos but also makes much of Jessie the cook’s increasing resentment that she’s not getting enough lines.  This could now be seen as prophetic evidence that everyone wants their bit of celebrity but it comes across as simply snobbish:  Jessie should know her place, in the kitchen.  Although Simon and Laura has fun illustrating television’s primitive techniques, it unsurprisingly majors in the pitfalls of live transmission – not exactly a proof of the medium’s inherent inferiority to film.  Repeated jokes in the script about less than princely BBC salaries present television as cinema’s poor relation in a strictly pecuniary sense

    Muriel Box certainly keeps the action pacy:  there’s real momentum in the build-up to the farcical climax, even as you hear the creak of plot machinery and flinch at some of the overacting.  A familiar face seems to appear on – then almost instantly disappear from – the screen in nearly every one of Simon and Laura’s ninety minutes:  Joan Hickson as a barmaid; Charles Hawtrey as a railway porter; Nicholas Parsons as a TV producer; Esma Cannon as an Ordinary Woman from Newcastle who’s also called Laura Foster; Gilbert Harding, Isobel Barnett and John Ellison as themselves.  All four main players succeed through a combination of hard work, theatrical verve and screen presence – although each of Peter Finch, Kay Kendall, Ian Carmichael and Muriel Pavlow has these qualities in different proportions.  Kay Kendall is particularly remarkable.  She was only twenty-eight at the time, much too young to play someone who’s been a star for as long as David Prentice can remember, yet Kendall’s imposing height and (essentially light-hearted) authority somehow make her senior enough for the role.  She also stands out thanks to some wonderful gowns, designed by Julie Harris, which Kendall wears superbly.  Peter Blackmore even gives her what would now be termed a post-modern reference.  Faced with the prospect of sharing the screen with a child actor as gruesome as Timothy, Laura insists you have to draw the line somewhere – even though ‘I have acted with octogenarians, dipsomaniacs, dope fiends, amnesiacs, and veteran cars’.  Spoken like a true star of Genevieve.

    8 May 2023

Posts navigation