Directed by Eric Rohmer • 1967 • France
Starring Haydée Politoff, Patrick Bauchau, Daniel Pommereulle
A bombastic, womanizing art dealer and his painter friend go to a seventeenth-century villa on the Riviera for a relaxing summer getaway. But their idyll is disturbed by the presence of the bohemian Haydée, accused of being a “collector” of men. Eric Rohmer’s first color film, LA COLLECTIONNEUSE (“The Collector”) pushes the Moral Tales into new, darker realms. Yet it is also a grand showcase for the clever and delectably ironic battle-of-the-sexes repartee (in a witty script written by Rohmer and the three main actors) and luscious, effortless Néstor Almendros photography that would define the remainder of the series.
Up Next in French New Wave
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The Young Girls of Rochefort
Directed by Jacques Demy • 1967 • France
Starring Catherine Deneuve, Françoise DorléacJacques Demy followed up THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG with another musical about missed connections and second chances, this one a more effervescent confection. Twins Delphine and Solange, a dance instructor and...
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My Night at Maud’s
Directed by Eric Rohmer • 1969 • France
In the brilliantly accomplished centerpiece of Rohmer's Moral Tales series, Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Jean-Louis, one of the great conflicted figures of sixties cinema. A pious Catholic engineer in his early thirties, he lives by a strict moral code in ...
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Claire’s Knee
Directed by Eric Rohmer • 1970 • France
"Why would I tie myself to one woman if I were interested in others?" says Jerôme, even as he plans on marrying a diplomat's daughter by summer's end. Before then, Jerôme spends his July at a lakeside boardinghouse nursing crushes on the sixteen-year-old L...