Rohmer: La Collectionneuse (1967)
Directed by Éric Rohmer; dialogue by Patrick Bauchau, Haydée Politoff and Daniel Pommereulle; screenplay by Éric Rohmer; starring Patrick Bauchau, Haydée Politoff and Daniel Pommereulle.
The first of the films in Rohmer's Six Moral Takes that I've seen, la Collectioneuse didn't really grab me as some of the other Rohmer films have done.
The film, ostensibly about three young people staying at a villa near St Tropez for a holiday, concerns itself seemingly with our inability to totally disconnect and quiet our minds.
One of the three, a young man named Adrien, arrives at the villa with his friend Daniel after just splitting with his girlfriend. Adrien is determined to seek a quiet time for himself to fully relax. He describes to us (in a monologue format that I've not seen in Rohmer's other work) the trouble with fully resting and the attractiveness of just floating in the sea, completely aimless.
When the third individual, a young woman named Haydée shows up though, this peace is threatened. At first Haydée brings men to the house and keeps Daniel and Adrien up all night, resulting in them casting one of her flings out of the house, but this doesn't fix anything.
Adrien soon becomes enamoured with Haydée, as seemingly does Daniel and tensions soon arise when they realise this threatens their original intentions for the trip. The pair of them start to lash out at Haydée and kid themselves about the nature of their relationships to her. This is an aspect of the film that seems a little troubling at times, and it becomes difficult to exactly see what point Rohmer is making and whether he is totally invested in what his two young men are saying.
Daniel's outbursts are the worst, involving degradations of Haydée's moral character for her propensity to sleep around - involving telling her she's not good enough for he or his friend, which Adrien echoes in many occurrences. I say it's hard to exactly see Rohmer's point here because he seemingly dwells on this point so heavily, forcing Haydée to come back to the men for protection from the other, or for companionship over and over. She appears a captive audience with very limited agency, a bit of a farcry from the female protagonists he'd be writing in later films.
Alternatively though, the men are all menacingly slimy and flawed, with Adrien as maybe the most reasonable one still being at best contradictory and frustrating and at worst contemptible.
A greatly compelling aspect of the filmmaking here though is Rohmer's infatuation with the relaxed, airy summer the villa offers the characters. In countless moments you feel a sense of peace arise seeing the main characters relaxing, in near-silhouette, basking in the sun, or reading a novel. It becomes difficult not to wonder, if these characters can't be happy on a holiday such as this, is there really much of a hope for them when they return to their daily lives?
Watched on 22nd April 2021