Movie Type: Psychological Drama, Comedy of Manners
Themes: Playing the Field, Opposites Attract
Main Cast: Haydee Politoff, Patrick Bauchau, Daniel Pommereulle, Mijanou Bardot, Eugene Archer
Release Year: 1967
Country: FR
Run Time: 88 minutes
Plot
La Collectionneuse is the third of director Eric Rohmer's "Six contes moraux" (six moral tales), and also the first of the series to attain full feature-length status (each of the first two entries, La Boulangere de Monceau and La Carriere de la Suzanne, ran less than one hour). Patrick Bauchau plays a self-centered young man on summer holiday in the Mediterranean. He finds himself irresistibly attracted to Haydee (Haydee Politoff,) the aloof young woman who shares his St. Tropez villa. Haydee is a sexual libertine, a "collector of men" (hence the film's title), but she appears disinterested in Patrick. For his part, the hero assumes that the girl's promiscuity is deliberately calculated to prompt him to seduce her. Filmed in 1967, La Collectioneuse was released in the US in 1971, by which time the fourth of Rohmer's Six Moral Tales, My Night at Maud's (69), had already debuted in America. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
La Collectionneuse (The Collector) is a 1967 film by Éric Rohmer. It is the fourth movie in the 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 De Fem benspaend, the Danish director Jorgen Leth describes La Collectionneuse as his favourite work by Rohmer and he hired one of its stars, Patrick Bauchau, to appear in his 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.
Plot
In Saint-Tropez a young man meets a beautiful girl who spends her time "collecting" boys.
