Word: rohmer
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...films of French Director Eric Rohmer are so literary in method that they practically force viewers to grope for apt novelistic comparisons. His My Night at Maud's was suffused with a Catholic sensibility that evoked thoughts of Mauriac and James Joyce. Claire's Knee, with its themes of memory and desire, had critics remembering Proust. La Collectionneuse (The Collector), the third of Rohmer's irony-laden "moral tales" to reach the U.S., may well get audiences to thumbing their Nabokov...
...other Rohmer stories, the protagonist is an amiably vain, self-righteous prig torn by his infatuation with two women. Adrien (Patrick Bauchau) is a dandified Paris antique dealer who decides to take a vacation from his mistress. His holiday goal at a friend's villa near St.-Tropez, he announces, is "to do and to be absolutely nothing." Unfortunately for his purposes, the villa is already occupied by a painter friend and by Haydee (Haydée Politoff), a pouty, bikini-clad young swinger who collects men much the way Adrien gathers antiquities. Her affairs with the painter...
...style and substance, La Collectionneuse is distinctly inferior to both Maud and Claire. Except for Haydée Politoff's sensual gamine, the acting is monotonously low-keyed. Rohmer's direction, never vivacious, is torpid even for him. Still, the masterful symmetry of the plot, the nuanced yet aphoristic clarity of the dialogue and the unobtrusive evocation of what D.H. Lawrence called "the spirit of place," explain in part why Rohmer has lately become something of a film fan's cult figure. John T. Elson
Such a minor conquest might recall Critic Percy Hammond's snipe at chorus lines: the knee is a joint, not an entertainment. Yet Rohmer's mandarin tact edges Claire's Knee close to philosophy. The acting reminds one of water spiders, which manage to stay on the surface by never being still enough to sink. Nestor Almendros' photography, with its floating summer vistas, is Proust's Combray come to life. When Aurora suggests that Jerome has become one of her fictions, he seems so, obeying impulses that originate from a mind...
...time. In its way it was the end of a line that could not be continued on the page-that needed the liberation of the camera. Directors such as Karel Reisz (Isadora) and Alain Renais (La Guerre Est Finie) acknowledge their debt to the master in every temporal experiment. Rohmer is no less a disciple, but much less a film maker. His work is sterile in its perfection; it lacks nothing but passion. And without that Proustian quality, all drama, all conflict, however witty or profound, becomes mere talk...