Adrien might be best off pulling the petals from a daisy and reciting, "She loves me, she loves me not." In Eric Rohmer's La Collectionneuse (1966), Adrien is a layabout artist who retreats to a large country house when his girlfriend leaves for an extended business trip in England. There he spends his time reading in the sun, talking to his antique dealer buddy and swimming. A pleasant routine until the arrival of Haydee, a friend of the house's owner. Haydee is the collector of the title ("collectionneuse" is the feminine version of "collector") and what she collects is men. Haydee runs through a series of brief flings and one-night stands until Adrien starts to wonder if she has her eye on him. Does she?

La Collectionneuse is the fourth in Rohmer's Moral Tales series (though actually the third filmed), but don't let that throw you. The "series" doesn't share any characters or plot so you can watch any one without being lost. Rohmer says, "I conceived of my moral tales as symphonic variations." And the "moral tales" might sound high-falutin'. But, really, La Collectionneuse focuses on a situation you might find in any soap opera, although admittedly the situation here is never quite as clear cut. Rohmer is more an observer and although he's taking a somewhat satirically detached view of the characters' problems, he's also somewhat in sympathy with them.

Rohmer met actor Patrick Bauchau, future director Donald Cammell (Performance; he also appears in one scene), cinematographer Nestor Almendros, and Barbet Schroder in Schroder's mother's apartment in the mid-60s. Together they made two hour-long films before embarking onLa Collectionneuse. Rohmer chose a house in St. Tropez near an abandoned torpedo factory and the entire cast and crew moved into it while filming. Since the budget was only $12,000 they wore their own clothes and cooked their own meals until Schroder found an Italian woman living locally who would cook for them, minestrone being a specialty. Though cinematographer Almendros used five photoflood lamps for some scenes, the house itself had no electricity so filming there was done mostly at dusk and dawn so the light would be very similar. Photographer Helmut Newton even loaned a car for use in one scene.

The film's young leads received co-credit for dialogue, but what happened to them afterwards? Patrick Bauchau (Adrien) was born in Belgium, raised in Switzerland and had just graduated from Oxford when he appeared in La Collectionneuse as part of its mostly non-professional cast. He became a buddy with critic Andrew Sarris before starting a long and varied career, most visibly as Sydney Green on the TV series The Pretender, though also appearing in an odd mix of films like Clear and Present Danger, Wim Wenders' Lisbon Story, Dario Argento's Phenomena and Emmanuelle 4. Hayd¿e Politoff (who also played Hayd¿e) was less wide-ranging, instead focusing on such horror films as Cemetary Girls and Queens of Evil (though a great title has to be Don't Play With Martians). Politoff even made a cameo appearance in Rohmer's Chloe in the Afternoon before appearing to retire from the screen.

Director: Eric Rohmer
Producer: Georges de Beauregard, Barbet Schroeder
Screenplay: Eric Rohmer
Cinematography: Nestor Almendros
Editor: Jacquie Raynal
Music: Blossom Toes, Giorgio Gomelsky
Cast: Patrick Bauchau (Adrien), Daniel Pommereulle (Daniel), Haydee Politoff (Haydee), Alain Jouffroy (Writer).
In French with English subtitles
C-88m.

by Lang Thompson