Film

La Collectionneuse

Name: La Collectionneuse
Genre: Drama, Romance
Released: 1967
Cast: Patrick Bauchau, Haydée Politoff, Daniel Pommereulle, Alain Jouffroy, Mijanou Bardot

Social drama

Rohmer's languid Riviera comedy observes three restless aesthetes sparring over desire, morality and who deserves whom. Shot in crisp colour with minimal plot, it's a film of conversation, glances and the spaces between attraction and action. For anyone who finds ideas sexier than spectacle, or who's wondered what happens when seduction becomes a game everyone's playing.

TMDb rating

3.5

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The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles1976

Both Rohmer's film and Akerman's occupy similar moral and philosophical territory—desire and routine, appearance and reality, the distance between how we think we live and how we actually do. But while La Collectionneuse is witty social observation, Jeanne Dielman is austere and structural, turning domestic labour into durational art.

Akerman's three-hour portrait of a widow's daily routine: cooking, sex work, prayer. Shot in real time, unflinching, it strips life to its mundane mechanics and finds something profound. A woman's labour made visible as philosophy.

But Three hours of watching a woman fold sheets and prepare dinner. Glacially paced. Tests your definition of cinema itself. Most will find it unwatchable; those who don't will never forget it.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles poster

Contempt1963

Godard's film about a film-within-a-film, a marriage cracking under professional pressure and Mediterranean light. Languid, colourful, funny and devastating—a masterpiece about desire and its discontents.

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A Summer's Tale1996

Rohmer again, late-period, about a musician torn between two women during a seaside holiday. Sunlit, romantic, and funnier than it seems. The naturalism is disarming; the observation is surgically precise.

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Lost River2015

Ryan Gosling's directorial debut: a family in economic collapse tries to save their house. Stylised, dreamlike, soaked in colour and melancholy. An odd, sustained mood-piece about dignity and small rebellions.

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Il Posto1961

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