ManFromSanFernando
It's amazing how diabolical those people sound when they declare that the ovens are the only place for those lacking beauty-completely ignoring the variety of good human attributes. This is the trap that many architects,artists, and designers get stuck in the search for beauty. The film is interesting despite my hate for it's characters because of it's exploration of the ideas of beauty and perception,it also was filmed in a gorgeous old mansion in the country. 1967 was an interesting year in film :Week End,Oedipus Rex,The Graduate,2 or 3 Things I Know About Her,Point Blank,Belle Du Jour,Bonnie and Clyde, Dirty Dozen, this one is worth checking out in addition to those others.
totius
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.
Howard Schumann
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.
joep-4
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.
AD
