Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Obessive Love (or Lust) Gone Wrong, December 5, 2001
As is true with the novel, _Damage_ the film is not for everyone. If you are easily offended or prudish in any manner, skip this one. I have talked with a few people who rented the film because they were fans of Jeremy Irons but were upset by the premise of the movie. So, as I said, if you are easily offended, skip _Damage_. Stephen Fleming (Jeremy Irons) is a prominent MP with a career that continues to blossom. He is married to an attractive, blueblood wife and has two healthy children. His son, Martyn (Rupert Graves), is doing well for himself: he has met a new girlfriend and has been promoted to an important position as political writer for a newspaper. Stephen and Anna (Juliette Binoche) meet at a party or get-together of some sort and discover an instant attraction. Stephen finds out shortly thereafter that Anna is Martyn's girlfriend. Within days, a steamy, destructive sexual relationship begins between Anna and Stephen. It continues, growing increasingly passionate, obsessive and harmful. In an odd (even wacky) twist of fate, their affair is discovered. Anna flees in her usual pattern and Stephen must return to his wife, Ingrid (Miranda Richardson), to see if he can possibly salvage his marriage. Aside from the plot being centered around a man cheating on his wife with his son's girlfriend, the intense sex scenes in the film will likely turn some people off. I have seen both the R-rated and the Unrated version of the film and I cannot tell any difference between them so whichever one you choose, you are sure to see plenty of skin. After I watched the film, I read the novel by Josephine Hart and felt that I understood the characters much better. Although Stephen does inspire some feelings of repulsion from me, I do feel sympathy for him. He has lived a life of routine and boredom. As Louis Malle discusses in the "One on One" feature found on this DVD, the family life Stephen has experienced is one built on habit, not on strong emotions. When Anna comes along, something snaps. All of the emotions that Stephen has bottled up come rushing out like a floodgate that has burst. I suppose, all explanations and interpretations aside, that in the end, _Damage_ is the kind of film a person with either love or hate, understand or misapprehend. If you enjoy films about forbidden love or love gone wrong, _Damage_ is certainly for you.
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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beyond Obsession, May 8, 2005
Do not read this review if you haven't seen the movie. I happened to see this movie for the third time a few nights ago. It came on at midnight, and I had to work in the morning, but I had to watch it again. I have read many of the reviews on this site, and though most of them grasp the primary messages in this devastating story, I read none that expressed what I feel is the most frightening aspect of the lessons to be found here. It is not just that obsession or obsessive love or obsessive sexual attraction is damaging. Here is a woman who had already been through this situation, albeit with different characters, and though she new the outcome, she could not help but to dive headlong into it. Her brother had killed himself because he couldn't tolerate the reality that she - for whom he had an obsessive and forbidden love - would love someone else. She had returned from a tryst to find her brother dead. Here, she plays with the fire of her fiance's father, and she "returns" from this tryst with her fiance dead. Though his death was arguably accidental, it is not a stretch to believe that he wished to die at the moment he discovered his father and his betrothed together. Thus she is, and will always be, an agent of damage, and the message she herself delivered to her lover - that she is dangerous because she is a survivor - fell on deaf ears. The father was thus warned twice - by the lover and the lover's mother. The father was not just unleashing bottled up passion - he was acting out a slow suidice. Some have said that Binoche's acting was not good in this film - that she was psychopathic, cold, unemotional. I believe she played it perfectly - a woman afraid of and resigned to her own destiny. Her apparent lack of emotion I saw as resigned awe that this man would desire, to his ultimate destruction, a woman as damaged as she. The message for me is found in the repetition of events and the inevitability of destiny - that in fact it may be impossible to overcome what is meant for a person and for those who come in contact with that person no matter what is accomplished in the name of healing. I am going to stop here. As a reached the end of watching this movie for the third time the other night, I realized that I could probably write a book about it. Sparing myself, however, I'm not going to do that. I highly recommend this movie if you can handle and/or enjoy the very darkest of the dark in human existence.
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23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Self-obsessed?, November 10, 2005
SPOILER ALERT!!!!
I would like to address some of the comments from other reviewers about this movie.
First of all, a lot of people seem irritated by the sex scenes. I would agree that these scenes of supposed lust are hardly titillating, but then I think that is the point. The overriding emotion seems to be more about urgency and desperation than desire. In fact, for all the intervening moments depicting heavy-lidded gazes and locked stares, the sex scenes themselves show the characters as being engaged in a sort of parallel experience rather than mutually involved. The parts where they do seem aware of each other have them performing acts that are almost more combative than communal. Perhaps that's overstating the case, but these people are not making love or even engaging in a grand passion so much as reveling in a kind of compulsive self-indulgence.
That leads me to my next point: many comments have been made about the lack of motivation for Irons' obsession with Binoche. While her involvement is slowly revealed as being a result of her twisted past and subsequent sick need to keep recreating it, his is so obvious as to be easily overlooked as just too simplistic: his obsession is all with himself. He has reached a point where a lifelong's worth of polite detachment is momentarily overcome, but it's not about her at all; it's completely about him. She is merely a catalyst, having been in the right place at the right time (or wrong, as it turns out) to start the chain reaction. Her emotional makeup makes her precisely the right candidate to spark his exploration of his own carnality. He doesn't fear hurting her--she is damaged already. Any fears of hurting his family are negligible compared to the vigor and rigor and sheer chaotic triumph of coming face-to-face with his own Id.
He pretty much spells it out at the end when he describes seeing her at the airport--"She was with Peter; she was holding a baby....She looked...just like anyone else." He can't remember what he saw in her. She wasn't remarkable enough to have caused such a cascade of destruction. That's because he wasn't responding to her so much as to something within himself. To put it somewhat graphically, whenever they got together, he was never inside *her* so much as he was going to a place deep in *himself*, and I think the photography tended to impart that, as well. While showing some of their most rapturous expressions, the camera had their nether regions almost in separate zip codes.
So why does he sit nearly trancelike before the giant portrait of the ill-fated trio? Is he reliving the hours and days, limited though they were, when he was utterly unbridled? Is he trying to make sense of what happened to him, to all of them? Is it a form of penance? Is he repining for precious things that are lost?
I think the first explanation the most likely. Although his life in Portugal appears to be a self-imposed exile, I feel he is no less disconnected now from life and other people than he ever was. He just isn't pretending any longer that it is anything different. And so he is living completely on his own terms at last without the imposition of societal expectations or relationships. He is essentially unchanged.
His wife had it wrong when she said for every person there is only one other person. For her, she says, it was her son and for Irons, it was Binoche. Then she wonders who it is for Binoche, and Irons gives her a very arrested look. We are to believe he is stunned by the realization that he isn't, and never was, the one.
Instead, he is acknowledging to himself that Binoche was only a vehicle for his self-expression. Later, he hunts her down in hopes of proving that's not true, that his son didn't die as a result of the father's supreme self-indulgence, but he finds that is exactly the case. There is no real connection between the two lovers.
Ultimately, she is left trapped in her sense of inevitability, and he is freed from the inevitable trappings of the respectable life.
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