Crash Into Me
Added 11/21/2009
Louis Malle's "Damage" is not the movie that launched Jeremy Iron's career as our reigning upper-crust sex pervert. That would be David Cronenberg's "Dead Ringers" shot 5 years before this film. Mr. Irons would follow this performance with turns in "M. Butterfly" and "Lolita", cementing his reputation as the actor most willing to go to the dark side of sexual perversion, a journey his characters never return from in one piece, if they survive at all. When I read Josephine Hart's 1991 novel of the same name, I wondered idly who could possibly play the leads and seeing Irons here, his casting is a no-brainer. There are very few actors who can pull off the tricky combination of aristocratic breeding and sexual depravity, but this is Irons' stock-in-trade.
When we first meet Dr. Stephen Fleming, he is a respected, high-ranking member of Parliament, with a lovely home complete with servants and an equally handsome family. Apart from feeling inferior to his father-in-law, who is the real source of the family affluence, Stephen's life seems about perfect in every conceivable way, his political star destined to rise even higher. But Stephen's a restless man; despite all his successes, he's wrestling with a mid-life crisis, at loose ends in a career that his ambitious wife wanted for him more than he wanted it himself. He is ripe for a Perfect Storm.
Enter the storm in the form of Anna, the dark and mysterious beauty who introduces herself to Stephen at a cocktail party. The two exchange an immediate frisson of carnal recognition, and Stephen is lost. The supremely inconvenient fact that Anna is dating and soon to be engaged to Stephen's son do not stop this pair from embarking on a torrid, wildly inappropriate, ultimately tragic sexual affair. Anna is damaged, she tells her new lover, and therefore dangerous. The 'damage' stems from the adolescent loss of her brother, in whose death Anna was either directly or indirectly complicit--that is for the audience to judge. Anna is not engaging in false advertising here, but her besotted lover does not heed what she says and stay away from her, to the detriment of everyone his life touches.
As Anna, Juliette Binoche has the more difficult, more unsympathetic role. Anna is an enigma, and enigmas are more easily explained on the page than onscreen, where a reader can get into a character's head. Binoche's Anna does a lot of unsettling stone-faced staring meant to be mesmerising, I guess, but despite her austere beauty which captures Hart's physical descripton of Anna closely enough, something vital has been lost in translation. Binoche's Anna lacks the force of any sort of vitality or spirit; for Malle it is enough that she just look beautiful and tortured. Binoche is very attractive indeed, but in the end, her face alone (and her propensity for wearing black stockings) is not sufficient explanation for all that transpires here. Is Anna a completely amoral self-serving Jezebel out to dismantle a happy family and betray all sorts of trust just because she can, being so irresistible, or does the greater share of blame fall on the men who singlemindedly (or using a lesser head) pursue the forbidden fruit she seems to offer? Whichever you believe, the book offers a more substantial portrait of a complicated woman than the one Binoche offers here.
This is essentially a two-actor showcase, and just about every inch of both actors is on display, particularly Irons. Some of the love scenes are unintentially hilarious; if I'm not wrong, Binoche and Irons may have actually invented several new lovemaking positions, none of them elegant to watch. Miranda Richardson as the wronged wife and Rupert Graves as the wronged son/fiance bring memorable poignancy as the collateral damage in this doomed affair. Even as this movie sickens, you will be unable to look away until the inevitable derailment.
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The perfect title
Added 7/26/2009
He's damaged, she's damaged, everyone around them is damaged and after Irons and Binoche give in to their sick attraction, the damage becomes fatal. Irons is expert at playing tortured, twisted, dissatisfied characters and he didn't let us down in this movie. Binoche is beyond bad. Her character apparently wants to relive her sick past and what better way to do it than to seek out her fiance's father and involve him? However, everything about Binoche irritated me, from her inexpressive face to her masculine appearance and piano legs dressed in black hose to the sex scenes where she flops around like a rag doll. I realize that the sex between them wasn't really a connection at all but an attempt to both self punish and feel but Irons could've used a blow up doll and achieved the same result. I gave this movie 5 stars solely on Irons' performance. His eyes emote pages of dialogue that Miranda Richardson struggles to deliver. She has perfected the tight throat voice and I was always aware that it was she that I was watching and not the character of Irons' wife. If you're looking for passion between any of the characters, then avoid this movie. If you can imagine driving through or flying over a scene where a natural disaster has just occurred, then you'll understand why this movie is appropriately titled.
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You Can't Love A Damaged Person
Added 1/16/2009
At the beginning of this movie we see Stephen Fleming (Jeremy Irons), Environmental Minister of Parliament, come home from a full day at work and survey his living room. His hands remain in his pockets. His jacket remains on. He is disengaged and bored by his surroundings.
Then Anna Barton, played by an illuminous Juliette Binoche enters the picture. Anna is the girlfriend of Stephen's son Martyn. Anna and Stephen enter a sexual affair without exchanging more than two sentences. Anna and Stephen's first sex scene is telling...Anna lays on a bed with her arms horizontal, like she's submitted to a crucifix. Their love affair is as destructive in the bedroom as it is in real life. Stephen tears at Anna's clothing, digging into her, pleading "Who are you"? The only time Anna laughs is when Stephen is tearing at her, unable to control himself.
Anna is "damaged" by her past-her brother committed suicide when Anna came of age sexually. Like a rape victim may need to relive her trauma within the safe confines of another relationship, Anna needs to be immersed in the incestual sexual bonds of her past, so she engages her father in law sexually. The "damaged" side of Anna is desperate for the twisted affair with Stephen. But the normal side of Anna needs a life with Martyn.
Stephen tries to turn his affair with Anna into love. Stephen attempts to put their relationship on a straightforward course-he suggests he break up with his wife and start a life with Anna. Anna asks why? Why give up your life for something you already have? Then Stephen tries to break off with Anna and Anna responds by giving him a key to a love nest telling Stephen "Do you think I would have married Martyn if I couldn't have you too?" Anna can not love without engaging her dark and light sides and she tries to align the Fleming family to her personality with disastarous results.
A brilliant film, one of my favourites. Whereas erotic scenes in movies like 9 1/2 Weeks seem almost contrived so that the director could get an arty looking shot, the sex scenes in Damage are primal. Some may be put off by such intense emotion. I loved it.
French cinephiles will probably find the themes in this film familar and unoffensive. The French seem to inherently understand the need for passion and marriage, even if the two aren't shared with the same person. Not coincidentally, Anna is 1/2 French. If you analyzed this film from a cultural perspective, you'd could probably attribute Anna's problems to the struggle between her French and English heritage.
The book by Josephine Hart which spawned this film Damage is as good as the movie. Highly recommended.
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Surprising and provocative
Added 12/22/2008
Damage is the believable story of a powerful man who loses his self control before an attractive, sexy woman. Irons finds Binoche hard to resist and keeps going back to her despite his knowledge that she is his son's girlfriend.
The movie carries on with steamy and erotic scenes as the two meet over and over again. His son finally finds them together and as he steps back literally, he falls over the bannister and gets killed.
Irons loses everything, his son, his wife and of course Binoche who leaves him and returns to an old lover who seems to be the fall back guy, Peter.
Could lust really solely lead a man? Could a man be so weak when faced with his own desire to the point of destruction to his family and everyone he loves??
Irons delivers one of his best performances.
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Emotionally captivating with brilliant performances by Irons, Binoche and Richardson
Added 6/17/2008
[BEWARE SPOILERS]
I don't know whether I've ever watched a film in which I identified more with all the characters than I did in this emotionally wrenching masterwork from the late, great Louis Malle. It is part of the genius of Malle to, like Shakespeare, make every character real and to see and present the depth of even those slightly off stage.
I could begin with the youngest, the daughter Sally (Gemma Clarke) who says little and is always at a slight distance, her serious face in the backseat of the car seemingly thinking dark thoughts, her face down the hallway at night, seemingly knowing that her father has committed adultery with her brother's fiancée--yet not knowing. Louis Malle wanted a certain expression on her face; he wanted the primeval depth of her character as a being that knows more than it knows to be etched upon the screen. And this is because what she knows and doesn't know is what we all know and don't tell ourselves, namely that there is a part of our nature that is not under our control, a part of our nature that can cause not just damage, but disaster. And we are helpless to even see it coming let alone stop it.
In the wife, played with precision and finesse by Miranda Richardson, we see a complex and open person who expresses herself with subtle incisiveness in little gestures and poignant pauses, but then when it all comes crashing down, she speaks with the power of cold steel cutting into flesh.
Juliette Binoche's enigmatic Anna pulled me in the way she easily vacuumed in Jeremy Irons' high toned minister, Stephen Fleming. She was a low pressure area of enormous force that sucked Stephen to her like some bit of fluff and made him demand incredulously "Who are you?" while realizing that until now he never knew himself and what he could feel. For those who are more familiar with the Juliette Binoche of, say, The English Patient (1996) or Cache (2005), the pure sexual power that she can radiate on the screen may surprise you. Here her power is in what seems like pure surrender. But it is Stephen Fleming who is surrendering.
Anna's mother, played with a nuanced directness by Leslie Caron, is one of those women who say whatever is on her mind regardless of the circumstances, often to the great embarrassment of everyone present. Yet at the end we see in her an instinctive wisdom that in retrospect makes it right that she should speak so candidly and without guile. If only Stephen had listened to her! If only he had understood that what she said was to be taken literally and as a grave warning. Of course in such matters, warnings are of no avail.
Louis Malle remarked in the interview that is on the DVD that Jeremy Irons felt that his character had to be played in some sense "as himself." He would be not only naked to the audience in a physical sense (he was; beware prudes) but also as an emotional human being. He needed to project the fall from all that is proper and circumspect to become someone who would grovel before a passion he did not know existed within himself. He had to go from high dignity to abject humility. Anna was the siren's call and he her chosen sailor. He could not resist even though his passion for her would destroy everything he had, his career, his wife and family, his reputation, his personal homeostasis. He would think that, yes, I must leave my wife and go with Anna, and she would have to tell him that you can't do that, your son would hate you.
And then there is Anna's passion, not just in the physical, but in the deeply emotion sense of the irrational when she says "Do you think I would consent to marry Martyn if I could not have you?" As we see it is only the wife who knows and expresses, after it is all over, the obvious truth: "Did you think you could go on like this every day into the future?"
Well, when you think about it, of course not. Yet neither Anna nor Stephen, both blinded by the wild passion they felt for each other, knew the terrible state of danger they were creating. Anna's sin is that of arrogance to think she could satisfy both the father and the son and could manipulate them like toys on a string and nobody would be the wiser. And Stephen's failing is really that of a child-like surrender to this flood of emotion and passion that Anna evoked in him. He, even more than she, is irrational and blind.
Did she love him? Did he love her? And what is love? it might be asked. Long ago I once said to a young woman, "I love you," and she said what Anna says to Stephen, "I know." Such an answer should be an eye opener, but neither I nor Stephen noticed at the time.
Seldom have I felt so much emotion while watching a film. I have seen most of Malle's work, and he is always personal and deeply involved with his characters; but I think here he has created, if not a masterpiece, at least a most compelling story of what it is to be human and to fall from grace. I think it is only right that it took a combination of human error (the key left in the lock by Stephen) and the callous hand of fate that sends Martyn over the railing to bring about his modern tragedy. And, as in all great works of tragic art, the seeds of destruction are there in the psyches of the characters like the heel of Achilles.
Here's a quote from Anna that foreshadows the ending: "Damaged people are dangerous because they know they can survive."
4 out of 4 people found this helpful.
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Crash Into Me
Added 11/21/2009
Louis Malle's "Damage" is not the movie that launched Jeremy Iron's career as our reigning upper-crust sex pervert. That would be David Cronenberg's "Dead Ringers" shot 5 years before this film. Mr. Irons would follow this performance with turns in "M. Butterfly" and "Lolita", cementing his reputation as the actor most willing to go to the dark side of sexual perversion, a journey his characters never return from in one piece, if they survive at all. When I read Josephine Hart's 1991 novel of the same name, I wondered idly who could possibly play the leads and seeing Irons here, his casting is a no-brainer. There are very few actors who can pull off the tricky combination of aristocratic breeding and sexual depravity, but this is Irons' stock-in-trade.
When we first meet Dr. Stephen Fleming, he is a respected, high-ranking member of Parliament, with a lovely home complete with servants and an equally handsome family. Apart from feeling inferior to his father-in-law, who is the real source of the family affluence, Stephen's life seems about perfect in every conceivable way, his political star destined to rise even higher. But Stephen's a restless man; despite all his successes, he's wrestling with a mid-life crisis, at loose ends in a career that his ambitious wife wanted for him more than he wanted it himself. He is ripe for a Perfect Storm.
Enter the storm in the form of Anna, the dark and mysterious beauty who introduces herself to Stephen at a cocktail party. The two exchange an immediate frisson of carnal recognition, and Stephen is lost. The supremely inconvenient fact that Anna is dating and soon to be engaged to Stephen's son do not stop this pair from embarking on a torrid, wildly inappropriate, ultimately tragic sexual affair. Anna is damaged, she tells her new lover, and therefore dangerous. The 'damage' stems from the adolescent loss of her brother, in whose death Anna was either directly or indirectly complicit--that is for the audience to judge. Anna is not engaging in false advertising here, but her besotted lover does not heed what she says and stay away from her, to the detriment of everyone his life touches.
As Anna, Juliette Binoche has the more difficult, more unsympathetic role. Anna is an enigma, and enigmas are more easily explained on the page than onscreen, where a reader can get into a character's head. Binoche's Anna does a lot of unsettling stone-faced staring meant to be mesmerising, I guess, but despite her austere beauty which captures Hart's physical descripton of Anna closely enough, something vital has been lost in translation. Binoche's Anna lacks the force of any sort of vitality or spirit; for Malle it is enough that she just look beautiful and tortured. Binoche is very attractive indeed, but in the end, her face alone (and her propensity for wearing black stockings) is not sufficient explanation for all that transpires here. Is Anna a completely amoral self-serving Jezebel out to dismantle a happy family and betray all sorts of trust just because she can, being so irresistible, or does the greater share of blame fall on the men who singlemindedly (or using a lesser head) pursue the forbidden fruit she seems to offer? Whichever you believe, the book offers a more substantial portrait of a complicated woman than the one Binoche offers here.
This is essentially a two-actor showcase, and just about every inch of both actors is on display, particularly Irons. Some of the love scenes are unintentially hilarious; if I'm not wrong, Binoche and Irons may have actually invented several new lovemaking positions, none of them elegant to watch. Miranda Richardson as the wronged wife and Rupert Graves as the wronged son/fiance bring memorable poignancy as the collateral damage in this doomed affair. Even as this movie sickens, you will be unable to look away until the inevitable derailment.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
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The perfect title
Added 7/26/2009
He's damaged, she's damaged, everyone around them is damaged and after Irons and Binoche give in to their sick attraction, the damage becomes fatal. Irons is expert at playing tortured, twisted, dissatisfied characters and he didn't let us down in this movie. Binoche is beyond bad. Her character apparently wants to relive her sick past and what better way to do it than to seek out her fiance's father and involve him? However, everything about Binoche irritated me, from her inexpressive face to her masculine appearance and piano legs dressed in black hose to the sex scenes where she flops around like a rag doll. I realize that the sex between them wasn't really a connection at all but an attempt to both self punish and feel but Irons could've used a blow up doll and achieved the same result. I gave this movie 5 stars solely on Irons' performance. His eyes emote pages of dialogue that Miranda Richardson struggles to deliver. She has perfected the tight throat voice and I was always aware that it was she that I was watching and not the character of Irons' wife. If you're looking for passion between any of the characters, then avoid this movie. If you can imagine driving through or flying over a scene where a natural disaster has just occurred, then you'll understand why this movie is appropriately titled.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
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You Can't Love A Damaged Person
Added 1/16/2009
At the beginning of this movie we see Stephen Fleming (Jeremy Irons), Environmental Minister of Parliament, come home from a full day at work and survey his living room. His hands remain in his pockets. His jacket remains on. He is disengaged and bored by his surroundings.
Then Anna Barton, played by an illuminous Juliette Binoche enters the picture. Anna is the girlfriend of Stephen's son Martyn. Anna and Stephen enter a sexual affair without exchanging more than two sentences. Anna and Stephen's first sex scene is telling...Anna lays on a bed with her arms horizontal, like she's submitted to a crucifix. Their love affair is as destructive in the bedroom as it is in real life. Stephen tears at Anna's clothing, digging into her, pleading "Who are you"? The only time Anna laughs is when Stephen is tearing at her, unable to control himself.
Anna is "damaged" by her past-her brother committed suicide when Anna came of age sexually. Like a rape victim may need to relive her trauma within the safe confines of another relationship, Anna needs to be immersed in the incestual sexual bonds of her past, so she engages her father in law sexually. The "damaged" side of Anna is desperate for the twisted affair with Stephen. But the normal side of Anna needs a life with Martyn.
Stephen tries to turn his affair with Anna into love. Stephen attempts to put their relationship on a straightforward course-he suggests he break up with his wife and start a life with Anna. Anna asks why? Why give up your life for something you already have? Then Stephen tries to break off with Anna and Anna responds by giving him a key to a love nest telling Stephen "Do you think I would have married Martyn if I couldn't have you too?" Anna can not love without engaging her dark and light sides and she tries to align the Fleming family to her personality with disastarous results.
A brilliant film, one of my favourites. Whereas erotic scenes in movies like 9 1/2 Weeks seem almost contrived so that the director could get an arty looking shot, the sex scenes in Damage are primal. Some may be put off by such intense emotion. I loved it.
French cinephiles will probably find the themes in this film familar and unoffensive. The French seem to inherently understand the need for passion and marriage, even if the two aren't shared with the same person. Not coincidentally, Anna is 1/2 French. If you analyzed this film from a cultural perspective, you'd could probably attribute Anna's problems to the struggle between her French and English heritage.
The book by Josephine Hart which spawned this film Damage is as good as the movie. Highly recommended.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
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