There are two movies I know of with the title The Collector. In both of them, the collectors are men, and their chosen objets are people, especially beautiful women; the genre can only be horror. Simply by using the feminine form of the word, Eric Rohmer’s 1967 film La Collectionneuse sidesteps many of the clichés about collectors whose acquisitiveness ultimately blinds them to beauty, even though the ethics of appreciation are at the forefront of his mind.
La Collectionneuse is one of Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales (which also includes the delightful Love in the Afternoon, made three years later). Its primary concerns are sex and aesthetics, not necessarily in that order. And the moral question at its heart is not a sexual one, but an aesthetic one — its subject is the ethics not quite of beauty per se but of taste. In its bones it must be, can only be, entirely French.
The protagonist and narrator is Adrien, an astonishingly and almost wincingly handsome1 art dealer who prides himself on his superior taste and cultivation in art, books, clothes, and women. He and his sour-faced artist friend Daniel go to stay in a beachside villa near St. Tropez owned by their rich and absent friend Rodolphe, and Adrian is looking forward to a monkish few weeks of swimming, reading, solitude, and rest. Upon arrival, he’s disappointed to learn that a third person has been invited to stay at the villa: Haydée, a young woman, emphatically not the kind of person with whom he likes to associate. “[Rodolphe] surrounds himself with the plainest people,” he complains.
The first time he sees Haydée she’s in bed with a lover; he walks in on them accidentally, seeing her eyes full of mirth. Later he sees her with a young man with bad sunglasses, both of them giggling like teenagers and tormenting some nearby chickens. In the evenings, rowdy men come to pick her up and take her into town; she’s not back until morning. While his features are classically angled, her face has no hollows or hard lines in it. Adrien doesn’t just dislike her, he’s offended by her — offended by her seeming lack of discernment, the indiscriminate nature of her pleasures. Adrien and Daniel dub her a collector of men, and they profess the same contempt for her that they feel for the collectors they depend upon for their art sales, who purchase inferior works in their pursuit of completeness:
A collector certainly is a poor wretch who thinks only of adding. He’ll never be happy with one object. He’ll always look for the remarkable object in a series. He’ll always want to have a set. We’re very far from purity. What’s important is elimination. The idea of collecting is opposite to that of purity.
Naturally, Adrien and Daniel both proclaim that they are certainly not attracted to Haydée. Adrien, especially, declares he will definitely not sleep with her, regardless of any efforts she might make to seduce him and add him to her collection.
Of course, both men become obsessed with her.
Haydée, for her part, goes on living her life. Her eyes have a laughing look and her posture is relaxed, without a whit of self-consciousness, even as the men preen and pontificate around her. She lounges on the beach, she swims, reads her book, and makes no effort whatsoever to seduce Adrien, to his chagrin. He cannot admit to himself the possibility that she doesn’t want to sleep with him — after all, he is a vastly superior person! — and so all her acts of indifference, her dismissals and snubs, he interprets as a cunning plan to arouse his interest. He shows her two antique vases, one priceless and the other worthless, and is smug when she likes the worthless one best. And when she sleeps with Daniel and then discards him as easily as a trashy paperback, Adrien assumes he’s next.
But then… he isn’t.
When another collector comes to the villa — the male kind, the kind with money and a taste for rare possessions — Adrien hopes to sell him the priceless vase and talk him into backing his dream of owning his own gallery, and also plots to use him to assert some power over Haydée. The scenes between the three of them crackle with rage, humor, and jealousy. It would be bad form to reveal the rest, but I will note that, with apologies to Chekhov, a priceless vase sitting on a mantel in Act I must surely be smashed by Act III.
La Collectionneuse flirts with open misogyny, and the men’s cruelty towards Haydée and verbal abuse of her can at times be difficult to watch. But the film itself is not cruel to her — I would even say that it’s firmly on her side — and there’s a delight and even a kind of grace in watching her effortlessly deflect all attempts at domination and humiliation.
But the story is really about Adrien, and anyone who has any interest in watching Eric Rohmer films in the first place will likely be able to see themselves in him. Unquestionably, this is a movie for aesthetes. Whether a morality that idealizes purity in the form of taste and discernment can ever be separated from personal vanity, and whether it suffers from the inherent cruelty of all moralities based on purity, are questions the viewer is left to consider.
The film has some sympathy for Adrien even as it seeks to skewer him. At his weakest moment, mocked for his lack of wealth and his dependence on his rich friends, he argues that there’s heroism in pursuing with one’s whole being the kind of beauty that the rich can thoughtlessly purchase. “I can’t imagine a dandy without heroism,” he says, and we know he is contending with something very close to the heart of anyone who watches others hoard and consume the things they hold sacred.
What the men can’t see is that Haydée isn’t a collector the way they understand it: unlike all the other characters, she is without possessiveness. And by her own code, she is entirely pure.
Adrien is played by Patrick Bauchau, who later played a Bond villain, was seriously considered for the role of Jean-Luc Picard, and married Brigitte Bardot’s sister Mijanou. Checking on his more recent film credits, they include Dr. Sergie Abramov in Mega Shark vs. Kolossus (2015) and Dr. Lucas in Big Ass Spider! (2013)