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After his girlfriend goes to London for a job for a couple of weeks, Adrien, an art dealer, decides to spend his summer in an empty mansion at the French Riviera together with his friend Daniel. Adrien plans to do nothing there, but his routine is disrupted when Daniel allows a 20-year old girl, Haydée, to live with them. Random guys often drive with their cars to the mansion to take Haydée out to hang around. Adrien tries to seduce Haydée, but she falls for Daniel. At the end, Daniel is annoyed by her and breaks up. Adrien and Haydée are finally united in a relationship. While they are driving, they stop at an intersection when Haydée spots two guys in another car. The guys invite her to spend the weekeed with them in Rome. Haydée is unsure, but already takes her stuff out from Adrien's car. As another car honks behind him for blocking the road, Adrien initially just drives his car to move away, but in the end continues to drive without stopping, leaving Haydée behind, realizing he doesn't want to be just another unimportant "throw away" boyfriend of hers. He returns to the empty mansion, and calls for the next available flight to London.
"The Collector" is one of only two Eric Rohmer's films that Roger Ebert included in his list of Great Movies, yet one could argue that the film critic should have picked some of Rohmer's better films, like "My Night at Maud's" or "Claire's Knee". Rohmer's opus is an acquired taste: his movies have no plots, are just a combination of casual 'slice-of-life' and 'hangout' movies about the relationships of youngsters. There are mostly no action moments, the characters just talk. And yet, in many of his movies, the bitter-sweet observations about human relations are equally as sharp today as they were back then. "The Collector" is "only" good. It has a wonderful beginning and an end, but almost 2/3 of its running time in between these two are boring. When one makes a movie only about talking, there better be one heck of inspired dialogues there. Yet "The Collector" is stymied by too many bland and ordinary scenes in the middle, losing the viewers' patience. The opening act starts on a high note by presenting all the three characters in short two-minute prologues—"1st prologue: Haydee", "2nd prologue: Daniel", "3rd prologue: Adrien"—and each one of them starts with the same number of people in the title of the prologue, from only one (Haydee), through two (Daniel and a philosopher sitting in a room) up to three in the third prologue (Adrien and two women at a mansion), in a neat metafilm touch.
The set-up for these three protagonists hanging around in the mansion near the beach has some sparks, mostly through dialogues ("I've done absolutely nothing since I arrived, and I actually do less every day", says the pretentious Adrien, while Daniel is more substantial: "A real idea is like a flash of lightning. We have just three or four real ideas in our lifetime"), up to humorous little moments (the bored Daniel and Haydee start picking up pieces of dirt on the garden and throwing them at a couple of chicken far away, with the birds just standing there, perplexed at what is going on). Adrien and Daniel may be symbols for existentialist nihilists, people who have given up on doing anything in life because they feel nothing makes any sense or a dfference, but when Haydee enters the scene, she changes their perception, and the two are actually "awakened" into doing something, whereby Rohmer ponders how romance and love can give meaning to the people. Haydee is frustratingly underdeveloped, serving only as an allegory of a "collector" who collects men and then throws them away after a short time, to find someone new all the time. One sequence in particular shows a neat foreshadowing: Haydee is running around with the art collector Sam, until she accidentally knocks over a valuable vase from the table, breaking it—a future indicator of Adrien's fate in her hands. Too bad the movie has so many "empty walks" when it could have been more dense. The ending is fabulous, equally as heartbreaking, surprising, sudden, as it is logical in its conclusion, a touching meditation on Adrien realizing he is replaceable and not special in this world. One is so enchanted by this incredible ending that one wishes the whole movie would have been better and more worthy up until that point.
Grade:++
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