The films of French Director Eric Rohmer are so literary in method that they practically force viewers to grope for apt novelistic comparisons. His My Night at Maud's was suffused with a Catholic sensibility that evoked thoughts of Mauriac and James Joyce. Claire's Knee, with its themes of memory and desire, had critics remembering Proust. La Collectionneuse (The Collector), the third of Rohmer's irony-laden "moral tales" to reach the U.S., may well get audiences to thumbing their Nabokov.
As in the other Rohmer stories, the protagonist is an amiably vain, self-righteous prig...