A bombastic, womanizing art dealer and his painter friend go to a seventeenth-century villa on the Riviera for a relaxing summer getaway. But their idyll is disturbed by the presence of the bohemian Haydée, accused of being a “collector” of men.
“De vrouw is het tegenovergestelde van de dandy. De vrouw is natuurlijk, dat wil zeggen afschuwelijk. Ook is ze altijd vulgair, en dus het tegenovergestelde van de dandy.” Deze uitspraak van Baudelaire zouden Adrien en Daniel met betrekking tot Haydee – altijd in het bijzijn van derden! – zeker bevestigen. De drie ontmoeten elkaar toevallig in de villa van een rijke vriend aan de Côte d’Azur. Adrien is kunsthandelaar, Daniel schilder. Haydees enige bezigheid lijkt te zijn om met zo veel mogelijk verschillende mannen te slapen. Als vleesgeworden verstrooiing is Haydee voor Adrien en Daniel, die zich een vakantie lang geheel aan concentratie wilden wijden, een doorn in het oog. Alleen al door haar aanwezigheid verstoort ze het zorgvuldig in scène gezette vakantie-isolement van de twee. Een commentaar dat de gebeurtenissen in het verleden plaatst, door Adrien wordt uitgesproken en op een afstand voor de beelden uit schuift, heeft niet alleen de karakteristieke trekken van iets dat is neergeschreven maar interpreteert de beelden ook dermate subjectief dat voor de kijker een andere mogelijke positie altijd opengelaten wordt. De film ontstaat pas wanneer de tegenstrijdige lijnen van tekst en beeld zich in de kijker verenigen. Rohmer heeft met zijn film literatuur zichtbaar gemaakt: hoe ze zich verhoudt tot het leven. De dandy’s aan het einde van de achttiende eeuw verkunstigden hun leven om er zo kunstwerken van te maken. Daniel, de schilder uit de film, is in het echte leven ook een schilder. De kleine, van scheermesjes voorziene verfdoos die we aan het begin van de film zien, was onlangs onderdeel van een tentoonstelling in een Parijse galerie; Daniel becommentarieert zijn onderwerp: “Met schilderkunst moet je jezelf in de vingers snijden.” Voor hem en Rohmer gaat het erom de kunst tot leven te brengen die niet geschikt is voor musea. Om met een beeld van de film te spreken: vazen zijn er in de eerste plaats om bloemen in te zetten.”
Frieda Grafe1
“La collectionneuse offers a case study in rationalization. With its rich, unapologetically literary, first-person voice-over narration by Adrien, the film is essentially about the disparity between the main characters’ subjective interpretations of events and another, wider truth, which may be gleaned by the spectator eavesdropping on the proceedings. Faced with the enticing proximity of Haydée, a bronzed, bikini-clad student, the older man cannot make up his mind whether to make a move and bed this doe or leave her alone. Here we see one of Rohmer’s most original tropes: the tepid attraction. It flies in the face of all cinematic convention, which dictates that the encounter of a good-looking man and a good-looking woman must lead to grand narrative passion. But Haydée is not, like Brigitte Bardot in And Et Dieu... créa la femme (1956), an irresistible temptation or force of nature; she is a somewhat scrawnier girl-woman, the cousin of Jean Seberg in Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse (another Côte d’Azur movie, released in 1958, which likely influenced Rohmer), who is still trying to figure out the limits of her feminine magnetism. She is obviously not a “slut,” a term the two men keep throwing in her face. She is sexually active, not inappropriately for her age, but I choose to believe her when she scoffs at their accusations that she is promiscuous, a “collector” of male lovers. No, she says, she is ‘searching’; she has as yet had no ‘lovers’ in the affectionate sense of the word.
Why, then, are these men so nasty to her? They are angry because she is a pretty morsel who, to their (sexist) minds, imposes on them an obligation to try to seduce her; they are angry that she has attracted them somewhat but not all the way (their own problem, but they interpret it as a kind of tease on her part); they are angry that she represents the utopian sexual liberation of a younger generation, and they are jealous of the cloddish, career-unburdened young men with whom she sleeps; and finally, they are angry simply because she is a woman, and all women, in their view, threaten to entrap them through the game of love. Haydée is not the most articulate young woman, though she says just enough to cast doubt on the men’s interpretations. There will be other Rohmer films that take us deep into the psyches of women; this one does not, but it gives us a very daring, precise portrait of the misogynistic, entitled, self-loathing psyches of men. And unlike, say, most Woody Allen movies, it does not let the rationalizing male character off the hook. Rohmer explicitly warned us, in an interview: ‘You should never think of me as an apologist for my male character, even (or especially) when he is being his own apologist. On the contrary, the men in my films are not meant to be particularly sympathetic characters.’”
Phillip Lopate2
“If the people in La collectionneuse are evasive, complex, and impenetrable-the sudden tonal shifts in many of the conversations are beguiling - the landscape that they occupy is uniform and majestic, a tension that levels the film with a mesmerizing consistency. Crucially, Rohmer never dips into judgment himself, instead letting the moral dimension of the film rest somewhere in between his own stance, that of the characters, and that of the viewer. To cement the open-endedness, Rohmer has Adrien return to a state of zero by the end of the film. After renouncing his infatuation with Haydée once and for all, he considers himself to be at last capable of utter freedom, finally stripped of any unwanted temptations. But quickly he realizes that he's plagued by anxiety, that the illusory rewards of his self-confirming victory were only temporary. Perhaps he has solved his own predicament by realizing that aspirations to nothingness are simply illogical and that there's no joy to be obtained from a life of social and existential apathy. In doing so, he has allowed Rohmer to emerge from a perplexing and revealing dive into the male psyche.”
Are the hills going to march off3
- 1Frieda Grafe, “Eric Rohmer: La collectionneuse,” Sabzian, 29 January, 2020.
- 2Phillip Lopate,“La collectionneuse: Marking Time,” Criterion Collection, 2006.
- 3“La Collectionneuse (1967) A Film by Eric Rohmer,” Are the hills going to march off, 2012.
