The films that make up Rohmer’s ‘six moral tales’ follow a loose narrative; a man sees a woman that takes his fancy, pursues her from afar, though during his pursuit he encounters another woman and gets sidetracked. He gets to know the second woman and discovers that she challenges him intellectually, makes him question himself and his romantic goals. Seemingly enriched by this encounter, he walks away from this second woman, having got free labour from her and a lesson about himself, so that he can be with the first woman.
The title of these films refers to the second woman, however, as she is the subject of his personal moral and philosophical contention. He is conflicted about his attraction towards her; she is his intellectual and moral equal, but being an attractive woman she is also an object of desire for him. The conflict threatens to unravel him, it bothers him so much that he should meet a woman like this. For the men in Rohmer’s six moral tales, he decides that he would not have such a woman, he won’t accept a woman who is his intellectual equal who challenges him (My Night with Maud). In fact, she would go as far as to repel him (La Collectionneuse). The films stage a micro voyage of discovery for him (especially so in The Bakery Girl of Monceau); that he is after all really quite immature, morally base, ruled by his dick, intellectually stunted, and must shuffle away with someone who he thinks is beneath him, the first woman he had pursued all along.
Things take a bleaker turn in La Collectionneuse (1967) as Rohmer expands the ‘moral tale’ of the indecisive man into something more psychological and involving several more characters to modulate his thinking. The monologue of Adrien, on summer holiday for the first time in a long while and staying in a spartan villa by the sea, reveals the very mind of a man who is repelled by his equal. He is, like several of the men in Rohmer’s collection of six, a callous philanderer, a skirt chaser. But he, like the other men around him in the film, has contempt for the second woman, Haydee, the titular collector, so called because she ‘collects’ men, by bringing a different young man back to the villa every night for sex.
Adrien and his host, Daniel, can barely hold back their hostility towards Haydee. To humiliate her, they egg on the other to sleep with her, but neither are particularly keen on the prospect because she won’t think either of them as particularly special, just mediocre, less good-looking, older versions of her preferred type. They are jaded, washed-up men approaching middle-age. She’s just as worldly as them, except she’s young, fresh, stylish, and beautiful, much to their resentment. Daniel initially tells Adrien to seduce Haydee (“screw her!”) but the latter wavers, gets caught up in his own mind about the kind of person she is, who he discovers to be morally complex and inscrutable, just like him. Adrien cannot bear being faced with a version of himself in the form of a younger, beautiful woman. So he insults her, calling Haydee a slut several times. She reacts with indifference towards his misogyny, while looking back at him, right through his brittle performance. When he tries to make advances on her with his slimy tentacles, she rejects him. Turns out Daniel has made his move behind Adrien’s back and had slept with Haydee in the villa, because he’s not really a gentleman like Adrien.
Adrien is an antique dealer who sells to a different type of collector, in this case a balding middle-aged man, who arrives at the villa to purchase from him a valuable vase made in the Song dynasty. Fancying himself a pimp, and not quite done with wanting to humiliate Haydee, Adrien arranges so that the two collectors spend a night together. The smarmy male collector is amused of course but doesn’t take the proposition too seriously. In agreement with Daniel and Adrien, as they share the same chauvinistic brain, the collector doesn’t see her as particularly valuable as a sexual prospect. When Haydee accidentally breaks the vase, she laughs, prompting the collector to slap her across the face, angry that she treats his ‘collection’ with the same triviality as she does hers. Fed up with the drama, Adrien and Haydee then decide to leave the violent collector with his broken vase, they ride off in his vehicle, but their imminent liaison is suddenly quashed by other men on the road who catch Haydee’s attention. She jumps out to meet them, leaving Adrien to the side. Refusing to stick around for Haydee and deal with male competition, he drives off in a huff, his ego wounded, and soon makes a call to reunite with the first woman. The end.
There’s no doubt that La Collectionneuse is one of the more (most?) misogynistic films in Rohmer’s oeuvre (a close contender is Claire’s Knee; the things one cannot unsee in a post-Epstein world) even though the other films in his six moral tales follow the same basic narrative structure. Except Claire’s Knee, the films in this series foreground the man’s inner monologue, along with the petty sexism that drives his behaviour towards the two women. He is consumed by his pursuit of a woman; why she won’t notice him even when they frequent the same place, is she playing games with him, is she ignoring him? Even though he’s practically a stranger to her (Bakery Girl of Monceau, My Night with Maud). These questions plague his inner world, while everything else is “stripped of physical action”, as Rohmer states the aim of his six moral tales. The narrator would go on stalkerish lengths to meet the first woman, finding excuses to gain her attention. His entitlement is interrupted by the appearance of the second woman. Whereas in his earlier films, the second woman who challenge his morals and ethics is abandoned unmolested by the man’s misogyny, in La Collectionneuse however, the man’s inner conflict convulses him to aggressively pursue her and push her away into the arms of other men.
There are important motifs, such as travelling to the seaside, in Rohmer’s six moral tales and subsequent films after that would reappear as the main stage for both his male and female characters. The sea is a redemptive place for them. It is where they are desperate to be, while it modulates their pursuit in the process. Something they are yearning for, always indeterminate and not quite known beforehand, is thought to be waiting for them by the seaside (this is most charmingly depicted in The Green Ray). The seaside and the beach (or lake) are places where they can distance themselves from the banality that constrains them as people and who they want to be. Deep down they know the banality is really themselves and the seaside is where they hope to find an iota of the sublime or ‘the answer’ that was elusive where they are based habitually but was within themselves all along. It took going to the sea to draw out these revelations.
Unlike the male-centred six moral tales, the female-led narratives in Rohmer’s films have a gentleness at their core because the leads are emotionally open and vulnerable (especially the leading roles played by Beatrice Romand). They are sensitive yet assertive and intuitive, overall complex and exceedingly likeable than the closed-off, arrogant men of his earlier films. Though no one is lauding the French New Wave for being women-friendly (Agnes Varda preceded her male counterparts but were not on the friendliest terms with them, not least with Godard). And Rohmer being the most politically conservative of his more progressive leftwing peers, he’s not a figure one would associate with feminism. Yet the generosity of spirit in his later films where a moral shift is far more noticeable, a cinematic experience enhanced by sumptuous cinematography and gorgeous use of natural lighting, make for a soothing balm for the eyes and heart.
Alicia Izharuddin 