Film Review
Six Moral Tales
Last year I watched Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales, just on a whim because I had nothing better to do. Which is probably the most Rohmerian reason possible to watch a Rohmer film. A casual decision made from a position of idle openness, the kind of choice that his characters spend entire movies agonizing over, except I made mine in about four seconds while scrolling through Letterboxd.
I did not expect it to crack my ribs open and move in.
The Six Moral Tales are not “moral” in the way that phrase suggests. There is no lesson. No punishment. No righteous ending where the virtuous character is rewarded and the flawed one gets what they deserve. Rohmer’s morality is the French kind, it is interested in how people make choices, not in judging them. The question is never “is this right or wrong?” but rather “what does this choice reveal about who you are?”
La Collectionneuse (1967)
Of the six, La Collectionneuse is the one I return to most. It is the third in the series and, in my opinion, the one where Rohmer’s vision snaps into perfect focus.
The setup is simple: Adrien, a pretentious art dealer, is spending the summer in a villa in Saint-Tropez with his friend Daniel. They are joined by Hayde, a young woman who according to Adrien and Daniel “collects” men. The film is about Adrien’s elaborate rationalizations for why he will not sleep with Hayde, followed by his elaborate rationalizations for why he will, followed by his elaborate rationalizations for why he did.
What makes it work is that Rohmer never takes sides. Adrien is ridiculous a man so committed to his own self-image that he cannot see the obvious truth of his own desires. But he is also recognizably human. We have all been Adrien at some point, constructing elaborate philosophical frameworks to justify what we wanted to do anyway. The difference is that Rohmer lets us watch ourselves do it, and the experience is equal parts cathartic and excruciating.
Hayde, meanwhile, is the film’s quiet miracle. On paper, she is a “manic pixie dream girl” decades before that term existed. In practice, she is opaque, unknowable a character who refuses to be reduced to what the men around her project onto her. She is not a collector. She is simply a person who exists, and the fact that men cannot understand her existence outside their own narratives is the point.
The ending that final shot of Hayde on the beach, walking away is one of the great endings in cinema. It refuses closure. It refuses judgment. It just watches her go, leaving Adrien (and us) alone with the uncomfortable realization that we never really knew her at all.
The Other Five
La Boulangère de Monceau (1963) and La Carrière de Suzanne (1963) are short films that establish the template: a man is torn between two women, one of whom represents stability and the other spontaneity. They are rough around the edges but contain the seed of everything Rohmer would later perfect.
Ma Nuit chez Maud (1969) is the series’ intellectual heavyweight a film about Pascal, probability, and the impossibility of rational decision making in matters of the heart. It is also, somehow, incredibly romantic.
Le Genou de Claire (1970) is the most purely pleasurable of the six. A man becomes obsessed with touching a woman’s knee. That’s it. That’s the plot. And it’s riveting. Also creepy honestly but didn’t think about that fact for a while watching the movie.
L’Amour l’après-midi (1972) closes the series with a warning: fantasy is safe; reality is where you can actually hurt people. It is the most “moral” of the tales, in the conventional sense, but Rohmer earns it.
Does Rohmer Matter Now
In an era of dopamine-saturated content, Rohmer’s films feel like an act of rebellion. Nothing happens and everything happens. People talk. They walk. They sit in cafes and talk some more. They make decisions that seem small but feel, to them, like life or death.
What Rohmer understood is that the small decisions are life or death. Not in the dramatic, cinematic sense no one dies in a Rohmer film but in the existential sense. The choices you make about who to love, who to spend your time with, who to betray or be betrayed by these are the decisions that define a life. Everything else is just noise.
Final Thoughts
I have watched La Collectionneuse four times since that first afternoon. Each time, I notice something new a glance I missed, a line of dialogue I misunderstood, a moment of silence that now seems to contain the entire film.
Rohmer said that his films were not about what people do, but about what they think while they are doing it. This is what makes them timeless. The clothes change. The architecture changes. The music changes. But the human tendency to overthink, overanalyze, and overcomplicate the simplest matters of the heart that remains eternal.
If you have never watched a Rohmer film, start with La Collectionneuse. Watch it on a Sunday afternoon when you have nothing better to do. You might find, as I did, that you had something better to do all along.