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.
