Haydee
Politoff, Patrick Bauchau, Daniel Pommereulle, Mijanou Bardot, Eugene
Archer
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.
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