La Collectionneuse (1967)

La Collectionneuse (The Collector) is a 1967 film by Éric Rohmer. It is the fourth movie (third in order of release) in his series of the Six Moral Tales. In 2001 the Guardian critic Philip Norman included it his list of 100 top movies of the 20th century. In his 2003 film The Five Obstructions, Danish director Jørgen Leth describes La Collectionneuse as his favourite work by Rohmer, and he hired one of its stars, Patrick Bauchau, to appear in The Five Obstructions. La Collectionneuse won the Silver Bear Extraordinary Jury Prize at the 17th Berlin International Film Festival.

Rohmer made the film with no budget and out of order while he waited for Jean-Louis Trintignant to be available for My Night at Maud's and this stricture possibly inspired the techniques and principles he and his cinematographer Nestor Almendros would return to in his later films: extensive rehearsal with the cast followed by very few takes; relying on natural light wherever possible, even for night scenes; "spying" fluid long shots to establish characters and their relationship together in a specific space. In his autobiography, A Man With A Camera, Almendros admits "The film had to have a 'natural' look, whether we wanted it to or not, because we had only five photoflood lamps." They used so little film that, "In the laboratories they thought they were the rushes of a short (film)."

Seymour Hertzberg who plays Sam, an American art collector, is actually Eugene Archer, a former New York Times film reviewer.

The film is lit by the late Néstor Almendros, who also appears in the film. The director and writer Donald Cammell also has an uncredited role in the film.

Synopsis

Two friends, Daniel and Adrien, are invited to vacation at a mutual friend's house by the sea in Saint-Tropez while Rodolphe is away. When they arrive they discover another friend of Rodolphe's is also staying there, a very young woman named Haydée who turns up, often very late at night, with a different lover each time they see her. The solitary vacation each of the friends had envisioned for themselves is dashed on the rocks of Haydée whom they first resist but then can't resist and it's not clear who is really in control of this game of "collecting" relationships.

Actors