On Screen

...In the present case, neither Nestor Almendros' color cinematography nor Rohmer's handling of the camera can do so much as squeeze a little atmosphere out of St.-Tropez, which constitutes an overwhelming underachievement in itself...

...While Robert Kaylor, the cameraman-director, and William Richert, the producer, were in the early phase of shooting in Dayton, Ohio, a young factory worker, Mike Snell, came to see the derby luminary Charlie O'Connell to find out how he could break into the roller racket...

...Neither the witticisms, nor the insights, nor the character study works at all...

...Rohmer goes Daniel one better and extends the emptiness right into the figures...

...She finally drops her various swains, considers Adrien briefly, and settles on Daniel...

...Haydee sleeps around assiduously and is dubbed by the young men la collectionneuse, the collectress of men...

...But if Giorgio Morandi could paint nothing but bottles all his life and make art out of them, Rohmer may be allowed his particular emotional bottleneck...

...Most of this mauling is not at all against the rules, but even its gorier excesses are barely penalized, and the intervention of the referees adds to the fun as they, too, get the bejesus walloped out of them...

...and Butch, an almost moronic, unappetizing slob of a younger brother who lives with them...

...Why, he wonders, are the Vietcong so hard to identify if they all wear black pajamas...

...Or we see Christina fighting with Butch, who swills up the gatefolds of Playboy, steals the raisins she wants to cook with the spaghetti (!), and refuses to help with the household chores...

...At last, Adrien and Haydee are driving back to the villa and the much-postponed consummation...

...They bait and insult her, which she takes mostly with a kind of provocative indifference...

...The whole thing smacks of improvisation, and the three principals are, in fact, credited with help on the dialogue...

...Instead, it follows the maunderings of three insignificant and pretentious people in so soggy, faltering a fashion that it should set admirers of Rohmer's other films to reexamining them...

...In one of the final scenes, Charlie shows us around his house outside San Francisco, complete with a kidney-shaped pool the size of a modest lake...

...Watching the "action," as the mayhem is euphemistically called, is a way of life, cradle to grave...

...when the actors are clods even at acting, it is positively disastrous...

...Patrick Bauchan is a perpetually snide but otherwise expressionless Adrien, Daniel Pommereulle is sulky and vaguely effeminate as Daniel, and, as Haydee, Haydee Politoff has a nice figure but a face that could take best of breed in the Pekinese division of any dog show, and gives no evidence of histrionic or even obedience training...

...They might find that these films, too, though less clumsily than La Collectionneuse, are cast in the unsatisfactory mold of the O. Henryish or Maupassantian anecdote, stretched out beyond endurance, and decked out with quasi-literate, shallow or hollow badinage...

...He keeps making remarks like "With me, the harder I get hit, the more I want to come back for more...

...I'm a lover, not a fighter," says the porcine, semi-cretinous youth, who can barely enunciate his words and whose face looks like a pimple under strong magnification...

...What fascinated me in you was your insignificance...

...This is what makes roller derby middle America's favorite sport, avidly watched both at the arena and on the home screen—the sport of kinks...

...Another dauntless derbyist is interviewed...

...The interview is intercut with scenes of the rink, showing him getting mangled...

...An elderly woman explains: "That's why we holler at 'em, trying to get a little action...

...Mike and Butch converse with a buddy, a Marine just back from Vietnam: "You know you've died, but some miracle, or the Lord—you know someone's rooting for you," he says because he was shot only in the hand...

...As she develops her theory, she comes up with some mildly interesting paradoxes...

...A three-year-old child seconds her...

...And when Daniel walks out on Haydee, Adrien palms her off on a rich and repulsive American client...

...And not so the fans shown in the film...

...The filmmakers now wisely switched from what was apparently to have been the sport as seen largely through Charlie's eyes, and turned their attention to Snell: his background, his family, his way of life— in other words, a study in the genesis of minor, as a symbol for major, violence...

...That emptiness around the human figure that you create by means of objects...

...Polarization is, like extrapolation, a completely obsolete theory...

...still, Butch doesn't want to go...

...Not so the audience at the Murray Hill Theater, who cheered and applauded every scene of violence...

...Adrien, fascinated by the girl in spite of himself, plays an elaborate game of self-delusion...

...My fortress of morality was yielding: Why not one brief liaison clearly defined in space and time...

...Christina and another wife have a coarse and stupid argument with another woman who has slept with both husbands...

...I made something of myself...

...He comments: "It's about 3,000 miles from New York City, and this is what I call God's heaven...

...She gets out of the car to talk to some boys who want her to drive to Rome with them...

...Near the beginning of the film a young woman says that she can only be friends with beautiful people...

...This is a dubious method at best...

...In another scene, Charlie is back in his home town, New York, to compete in Madison Square Garden...

...It considers the bloodlustiest sport left in the U.S., roller-derby skating, whose tiny sport part consists of grown men and women rolling unremittingly around a rink, and whose preponderant bloodlust part consists of continuous punching, kicking, tossing over the railing, rolling over prostrate bodies, and several other forms of beastly manhandling...

...He lets chance or a whim deprive him of Haydee...

...Adrien, an art dealer and playboy, has parted somewhat sourly from his mistress Carole, who has gone to London for the summer...

...Alone and morose at the villa, he finally picks up the telephone to inquire when the next plane leaves for London...

...He and a pop-artist pal, Daniel, share an absent friend's St.-Tropez villa for the summer with a girl they have not previously met, Haydee, on whom Adrien once walked in when she was having sexual intercourse...

...Rohmer is the master of the well-turned epigram that only lacks wit, the apothegm through whose loose bottom the significance has dropped out...

...This time it is La Collectionneuse, the fourth of his "Six Moral Tales," fitting into the grand scheme between My Night at Maud's (#3) and Claire's Knee (#5...

...He hopes "to lay back and say "This is what it was worth getting your head beat in for.'" In the last scene, the derby is again beginning, and the public address system enjoins the audience to rise for our national anthem...

...That, though in a different sense, is what Rohmer does, too...

...Why Rohmer should think the subject of a man drawn from one woman to another and finally drifting back to the first so endlessly fascinating as to deserve six full-scale treatments I am at a loss to say...

...a fawning critic gushes to Daniel in one of the film's several prologues...

...But the friend has no real quarrel with the war...

...Mike's father, from his hospital bed, encourages his son to go and become a great roller star...

...Following adults who don't know what they're doing either...

...My life was always my profession: I decided to do nothing well...

...After a few pitiful squeaks, the voice resumes: "We believe that under the circumstances—the record is probably broken—we'll dispense with the national anthem...

...Slight as the story is, it is told with many a halt and lurch, inconclusive little episodes that have no shape or special significance, details that seem to await some ingenious exegete to find a meaning for them...

...he observes: "Ninety per cent of the skaters have completed college and stuff of this nature...

...their two small, rather backward children...

...Once the car is rolling, however, he no longer wishes to stop...

...Had the film proceeded to develop and dramatize this theme, it might just barely have made a contribution to our understanding of the erotics of social intercourse...

...Derby is often funny, always frightening...

...We see a lot of action on tv, so we want to see it when we come out for the derby...

...Voila...

...I tend, on principle, to mistrust films in which the author's invention is so sluggish that it cannot even invent fictitious names for the characters...

...I guess you get tired of being hassled so much...

...ERIC ROHMER is at it again...

...Adrien is blocking the traffic and is told to move on a little...

...Some of the derby shots are so gruesome that one's only defense is pained laughter...

...It makes you feel that the record is irremediably broken, and that we may have to dispense with the anthem permanently...

...Now kids no longer skate, he mourns: "They're just running around in circles...

...Snell turned his life over to the filmmakers: his marital bliss in an $80-a-month house with his wife Christina, a part-time waitress...

...The canvas gradually expands: Mike working at the factory, getting a loan to buy a bike to go to San Francisco and roller school, whoring around with his buddies (remarking about a girl he sleeps with, "I wish she had as big a tit like my old lady has...

...The roller champion, accompanied by his speechless wife and gum-chewing father, revisits the park where he and other kids once passionately skated...

...A friend of Mike's explains why they all tote guns: "Most of us guys around the bars have them...