Low-Keyed But Audible

By John T. Elson

The films of French Director Eric Rohmer are so literary in method that they practically force viewers to grope for apt novelistic comparisons. His My Night at Maud's was suffused with a Catholic sensibility that evoked thoughts of Mauriac and James Joyce. Claire's Knee, with its themes of memory and desire, had critics remembering Proust. La Collectionneuse (The Collector), the third of Rohmer's irony-laden "moral tales" to reach the U.S., may well get audiences to thumbing their Nabokov.

As in the other Rohmer stories, the protagonist is an amiably vain, self-righteous prig torn by his infatuation with two women. Adrien (Patrick Bauchau) is a dandified Paris antique dealer who decides to take a vacation from his mistress. His holiday goal at a friend's villa near St.-Tropez, he announces, is "to do and to be absolutely nothing." Unfortunately for his purposes, the villa is already occupied by a painter friend and by Haydee (Haydee Politoff), a pouty, bikini-clad young swinger who collects men much the way Adrien gathers antiquities. Her affairs with the painter and a wealthy American art fancier gradually arouse Adrien's own confused feelings of jealousy and lust. Amused by the thought of a new conquest, Haydee consents to sleep with him. But in a final spasm of pique, Adrien drives away while she talks to a brace of former boy friends. Alone at the villa, unsatisfied with the solitude he initially sought, Adrien at film's end decides to rejoin his mistress.

In style and substance, La Collectionneuse is distinctly inferior to both Maud and Claire. Except for Haydee Politoff's sensual gamine, the acting is monotonously low-keyed. Rohmer's direction, never vivacious, is torpid even for him. Still, the masterful symmetry of the plot, the nuanced yet aphoristic clarity of the dialogue and the unobtrusive evocation of what D.H. Lawrence called "the spirit of place," explain in part why Rohmer has lately become something of a film fan's cult figure. John T. Elson

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