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188 out of 199 people found the following review useful:
A brilliant but misunderstood film, 13 January 2004
Author: theodarsey from San Francisco, CA

I'm mainly posting this because I've been reading the other comments here, and I just had to respond. While a movie's quality is (for the most part) subjective and everyone is entitled to his/her opinion, I must say that those who thoroughly panned this movie have really demonstrated how little imagination most people have, and their lack of appreciation for subtlety in film or any other artistic medium is readily apparent.

For all the talk about the sex scenes in this movie and how they're laughable, or not erotic or whatever, no one is getting the point: the sex between Irons and Binoche is not there just to get the audience all hot and bothered. You have to look at it within the context of the story: these two people are not just out to get laid, to satisfy some momentary sexual whim. They didn't say, Oh, hey, you look hot, I'd sure like to bang you. From the moment they meet they are both captive to an overwhelming, inexplicable passion, due to deep-seated, subconscious motivations stemming from each person's individual history and emotional nature. It's fairly clear from the mostly silent, often awkward, and sometimes almost painful-looking sex that they are not in it for the sheer physical sensation, or even to show affection/love for each other. They simply can't help themselves. Through sex with each other they appear to be working out their own individual pain, a sense of loss or longing for something they are unable to express any other way, and the physical act is almost incidental. Whether they betray or hurt anyone else is beside the point. Each is damaged, and this is how they attempt to repair that damage, but it's a hopeless cause. This is why the sex comes off for the most part as passionless, futile, and far from pleasurable. These are not happy, normal people--they cannot experience much real pleasure the way the average person does. The sex, in service to the story and the characters, is portrayed just as it should be.

'Damage' a terrible film with bad acting? Nonsense. Even if you don't like it, i.e., it's just not to your taste, it's really impossible to deny that this movie is well done in every respect, and when it comes down to it, that is the only real criterion for judging the merit of any work of art. Did all the elements of the movie work to get across what the filmmaker was trying to do? Absolutely. Most people seem to be judging this movie based on their own petty, immature biases developed over years of watching empty, brainless, formula movies: do I like this actor's voice or looks; am I turned on by this actress's body; are these people and the things they do and say close enough to my own ideas about what people are like and how they should behave; does this movie let me remain in my safe, shallow, ignorant bubble of conformity and enjoy my microwave popcorn on the couch? I'm also amazed when people talk about how there are no characters to 'like' in a movie. Who cares? This should not be the point of any work of art. Life does not always present us with likable people, and neither does art. Jeremy Irons, Juliette Binoche and Miranda Richardson are all superb. Richardson's intensity is mesmerizing, and Irons and Binoche communicate incredible depths to each other and the audience with the smallest gesture or a seemingly pedestrian line, proving that less is almost always more. Watch Irons early on as he portrays his character's quiet sense of desperation and yearning to break out of his comfortable but dead existence, as though all his life he's been out of place, wondering how he got there but unable to articulate it. Binoche has few lines most of the time but doesn't need them: she shows convincingly with her face and movements an entire world of desolation and pain in Anna, along with the fierce drive she carries to maintain some semblance of hope in her life. This is all also due of course to the script and the direction. Besides all this it's also an incredibly stylish and gorgeous movie to look at. I don't know how anyone with any imagination or perceptiveness could find this movie boring or badly done. All in all, I highly recommend this film for a mature, sensitive, and powerful look at human relations and behavior. It's almost mythic in its ability to convey a sense of inevitability and emotional devastation. Brilliant, and hard to forget.

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50 out of 58 people found the following review useful:
Very Good Human Drama, 4 July 2004
Author: David Watts from London, England

I don't know. I have read some of the reviews here and some literate folk seem to me to want to wax lyrical about vapor. Meaning, sometimes people get a kick out of writing silly things.

If this is the worse movie anyone has seen, then they've not seen many movies. I'm not saying it is for everyone, it's a long key affair, where everything is below the surface (which is actually referenced in the film over a dinner table scene) until finally it breaks free with horrendous results.

Four great performances, Irons is brilliant as a man with great self-control who finds himself for the first time ever, obsessed. Richardson who nearly steals the entire film with a single scene near the end - writing years of personal grief across her face in bruises. Binoche who knows where safe harbor lies (with Peter) who cannot avoid destroying peoples lives. Graves as the ineffectual son, who knows he's in love with a woman in pain, but does not yet know how it will manifest itself.

It's a good film. Beware of anyone who goes to extremes to say otherwise. It's not an easy film to ridicule. (ps. I watched the R2 DVD, it's an awful presentation - AVOID).

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36 out of 38 people found the following review useful:
what happens when you don't wear underwear, 27 December 2007

Author: blanche-2 from United States

Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche do some "Damage" in this 1992 film also starring Miranda Richardson, Rupert Graves, Ian Bannen and Leslie Caron. Irons is a British cabinet minister who falls for his son's girlfriend (Binoche), a deeply disturbed young woman.

Despite the facetiousness of my summary line, this is quite a brilliant film about emotionally damaged people and obsession. It also comes off as very realistic because the emotions are portrayed so honestly. On the surface, it seems ridiculous, sort of a sex-change version of The Graduate, with Binoche involved with both father and son. Here is the Irons character, Dr. Stephen Fleming, with a brilliant career, a beautiful wife (Richardson) whose father (Bannen) has had a brilliant career; they have two children and a lovely home and lifestyle. Why threaten it with a tawdry affair? I kept thinking what an idiot Irons was throughout the film, yet we know that in real life, people have played Russian roulette with their careers before.

It's clear when Anna seeks out Stephen and introduces herself that her attachment to Martyn (Graves) was simply to get to him - and she does -immediately. All they can do is stare at one another. When she invites him to her apartment, she is sitting on the edge of her bed. Seeing him, she sinks to the floor, her arms outstretched. Because she never wears underwear, they can usually have sex with most of their clothes on and have it anywhere - street corners, tables, Stephen's father-in-law's house. The sex isn't particularly erotic to watch; it's awkward-looking because of the frenzy involved.

Part of the obsession for Stephen is the unleashing of passion that's been sublimated; part of it is the danger - and is part of it having something he didn't have in his own youth that his son has now? Does he look at Martyn and see that Martyn's life is ahead of him and that he, Stephen, is no longer "young?" Possible. Is he angry with Martyn for replacing him in his wife's affections? Perhaps. For Anna, the motives and thrills are different - due to a tragedy in her life involving her brother who apparently was in love with her too, she is playing some weird psychological game in which there is no real winner.

The acting is marvelous - Binoche is exquisitely dressed though some of those marvelous clothes are ripped off of her - she brings an exotic, androgynous and mysterious quality to the role of Anna. Irons is excellent as an up-tight father and half-crazed lover. Leslie Caron has a small role as Anna's mother. She's lovely as ever and strong in a dramatic role of a woman who drinks a little but who nevertheless has Stephen's number.

The last 30 minutes of this movie are some of the most shattering moments in film, and what makes them so shattering is not only the situation but the absolutely devastating, visceral, no holds barred performance by Miranda Richardson. She is ably supported by a writer and director who both knew something about profound pain. Her performance is great - that she had the material to give that performance and a director who let her go makes this film truly unforgettable.

When Damage is over, you won't be the person you were when you started watching it. It's so rare nowadays to see such a fascinating, character-driven film. It will stay with you for a long time.

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34 out of 38 people found the following review useful:
Fascinating, 3 September 2004
Author: paulvdree (paulvdree@hotmail.com) from Zutphen, Netherlands

This movie is really much less shallow than many people criticizing it would think. Actually, I was captivated by it from start to finish. It is understandable that one would question the likeliness of all these events happening, and in that respect the characters might be a bit unreal. But I don't think the movie should be watched that way. The sheer unreasonable passion between Anna and Stephen should be felt, not analyzed. I think that a lot of people wished that they would or could feel something like this for another in today's harsh, business-like world. It is always an easy way out to be cynical about it. Although the characters and their relationships are not very "deep", I found everything entirely believable, and that is the only thing that counts.

I did not really ever see an entire movie with Binoche or Irons, and I wonder how they managed to slip through for so long, because I loved them both. Funny how one commentator remarked that the Anna character should have been sleazier for credibility. Don't you see that this all about self-destruction? The tiny, innocuous-looking Anna that Binoche portrays, a girl that most people wouldn't give a second look, a girl that might seem cold at first sight, is just what attracts Stephen, because they both find in each other what they have never found in anyone else. Both characters are on a mission to make their lives more miserable, because that it what defines them. This certainly goes for Anna, but Stephen is even more interesting because his life is so well organized. Anna is just a catalyst for everything he probably wanted to happen one way or another, and that is why he will not stop their "collision course" when he still can. The inevitability of it all shows best at the end: he shows no remorse, or any other emotion, just acceptation. He was subconsciously wanting to put and end to the life he had been living so far. This is also a feeling that many people can relate to, I think. Yes, the end is a bit theatrical maybe, but it didn't bother me. I'd watch it again next week.

Great movie. **** out of ****.

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25 out of 30 people found the following review useful:
If I was on a deserted island with only 1 movie..., 5 April 1999
Author: Shelley A. Leedahl (shelleyannleedahl@home.com) from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada

There's a fine line between passion and pain, and no one does either of them better than Jeremy Irons. Obsession is the bottom line here, and anyone who's been there can relate. Nothing else matters, and in this movie, Irons crosses all the lines. His first introduction to Binoche...their first rendezvous...their last ...these are engraved in my memory. Sure rich and beautiful people populate this movie, but the emotional punch it packs is one hundred percent REAL. Miranda Richardson, as the grieving mother, couldn't be better. The haunting photographic image near the end of the movie hit me very hard. A deserted island? And only one movie? Damage. Damage. Damage.

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28 out of 38 people found the following review useful:
A Louise Malle masterpiece of unbridled passion!, 18 February 2004

Author: yossarian100 from usa

Fatale (Damage) is one of the most deeply lustful and emotionally charged films I've seen in years, a true Louise Malle masterpiece of unbridled passion. The love scenes are hot, to say the least, and I'll never be able to look at Julliet Binochet again without remembering them. Jeremy Irons does incredible work here and Amanda Richardson, who's part really doesn't require much during most of the movie, actually steals the film with some over the top acting at the end. However, it's Julliet Binochet who anchors this fine movie with her riveting performance and her strong and quite impressive visual presence. I simply couldn't take my eyes off her whenever she was on screen.

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18 out of 21 people found the following review useful:
I like this movie., 12 January 2005

Author: mainecoon50 from United States

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

I like this movie, not so much because of its analysis of but because of the directness with which it portrays obsessive behavior and the price it demands. All the action struck me as very immediate and real, not contrived in any degree. We read about such behavior every day, be it the bank teller who embezzles huge sums to feed a crack habit, or the respectable family man who throws everything away on a gamble.

Some, undoubtedly, will be put off by the film's graphic sexuality. But I'm one who regards all human activity as some form of sexual expression. To me the sexuality was simply a medium. The drives, the betrayals, the lies, and the ultimate tragedy were the real story.

I also regard Anna as a tragic character, not self-indulgent or spoiled. Watching her play out the drama with Stephen is like watching Greek tragedy. She knows what's coming, but it has to be, and she really can do nothing to stop it. And when the story comes to it's resolution I pity her. She knows the damage she's done, and now she has to go on and repeat the tragedy. And it all stems from her sense of original sin with her brother.

There's a parallel here with Brenda and her brother in HBO's Six Feet Under.

I also like the fact the it ends with more questions than answers. When Stephen is talking to the detective following the death of his son the man asks, "And your son didn't know about your affair?" Stephen shakes his head matter-of-factly. The detective responds, "Are you sure?" For just a moment the camera makes it evident that, no, Stephen is not sure. And as he regards the photograph at the end, what is it he's searching for in those faces? His son looking at Anna, he looking at his son, and Anna looking straight at the camera.

Truly an interesting and stylish drama of human relationships that could be quite immediate, quite real.

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10 out of 11 people found the following review useful:
The Cruelty of Eroticism, 14 June 2006

Author: nycritic

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

It's been accused of being a cold study in sterile eroticism, a completely passionless love story, and a rip-off of LAST TANGO IN Paris. Whatever it is, Louis Malle's movie DAMAGE is an unforgettable experience that takes the viewer into a story of cloying obsession that spins out of control and literally "damages" every player in the movie.

The story is simple. Dr. Stephen Fleming meets his son Martyn's fiancée Anna Barton during a social gathering and from the moment they lock eyes on each other, Stephen feels his own world start to crumble. (A quiet scene in which Jeremy Irons stands in his living room surveying his Architectural Digest house, looking completely bored, is telling.) He receives a phone call. It's Anna. She, interestingly enough, wants to meet him. He goes to see her, and finds her sitting in a chair, regarding him with haunted eyes. From then on, they embark in an affair that is supposed to be torrid but comes off as increasingly disturbing -- indeed, the camera has them at one point making love while covering their eyes, as if they were practising some mechanic erotic session. It's art directed within an inch of its life, and that makes it more unsettling.

Anna, in the meantime, has let Stephen know that she will not leave his son, and that she is damaged: hence the title. Of course, a man of Stephen's stature would know better even when Anna's mother (Leslie Caron) drops by and hints that maybe it's best that he not pursue Anna. However, a man in lust can't be dissuaded that simply, but neither can a woman whose motives for pursuing a relationship with her fiancée's father seems to be out of the need to get caught at one point.

When it happens, it has the deadly silence of time standing still. Martyn effectively because a sacrificial lamb to the pair's illicit love affair, and this has more repercussions as it finally smashes the crystal ball the Fleming's household always was. Miranda Richardson, as Ingrid Fleming, explodes in a moment of rage so raw she practically bleeds out of the movie's frame. She makes you despise Stephen. It's a moment that truly elevates the movie from its soap origins and plunges it into a void where there is no escape.

DAMAGE has the luminous and haunting presence of Juliette Binoche in a role tailor made for her. With those deep, dark eyes, the alabaster skin, and that cold beauty, she conveys her character's dysfunction only in hints here and there, and is a precursor to what she would further in the character she played in TROIS COULEURS: BLEU. I can understand why a man like Stephem Fleming would have fallen so hard for her to a point where he is literally ill at the thought of not having her. Irons, too, is excellent as Stephen -- his chiseled features play well with his character's hunger for something else than routine.

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23 out of 38 people found the following review useful:
Binoche is the ultimate home wrecker, and much more culpable than Irons, 15 March 2001
Author: djexplorer from Manhattan

What I find interesting about the prior reviewer is that he could only comment upon the sleaziness of the Jeremy Irons characters. I fully expected to see that in most reviews. It is also most unbalanced, in the manner of the sex role ideologies of the 90's and the oughts.

For any not submerged in feminist victimization ideology, or an exaggerated gallantry, but who can view the situation with a modicum of gender neutrality, the Binoche character is far more culpable than the Irons character. She is no ingenue. Her character must be around 30, and a very worldly 30 plus at that (although she looks 35 plus) -- to his perhaps 45. She plots from moment one to seduce her boyfriend's father, not long after she has hooked up with the boyfriend. She does succeed soon enough, which does him no credit. But he believes she is just one more of a long line of his son's very temporary, and not particularly involved sexual relationships -- and he exudes an obviously sexual loneliness. The Irons and Binoche characters have a very torrid, and mildly S&M, relationship. All along he is obviously conflicted and very uncomfortable that she continue the relationship with both of them. Midway, he wants to leave his wife, make an honest (if marriage destroying) breast of it, and be with her alone. Binoche wants no such thing. She wants both father and son.

What is really maximally warped is Brioche's continued pursuit of the father after the son has proposed marriage, after she has accepted, and after Irons tells her with obvious anguish, but apparent sincerity, that he has decided that he has to break it off, and is breaking it off. It is not a mixed message. He even makes a non-revelatory, but symbolic and emotionally communicative visit to his son in his new, early achieved job as assistant political editor at a tony London newspaper. But Brioche relentlessly pursues him, and lures him back again -- while she is in the midst of planning the wedding.

Further, she spares not a single thought for his public career -- despite the fact that he is a British cabinet minister - or perhaps it is an assistant minister. (She works in a high end antiques establishment).

Sure, she has her troubled childhood history. But even there it isn't clear whether she is more victim, or manipulator. Certainly she was not the most ultimate victim earlier, either. As well, the Irons character, for all his public success, also obviously has emotional issues. They are familiar ones -- a reasonably pleasant, but passionless marriage, a midlife crisis, and a general sense, reflected by his children, that his greatest failing in life is not letting himself go more, not living with more passion. He at least makes some efforts to control himself, and to distance himself after her intentions to commit herself (at least publicly) to his son become clear -- while she does not -- at all.

He of course ends up far more damaged by her than the other way around. She it would seem entered damaged, and left with the pattern just more confirmed.

And yet as I expected, and have so far seen, the currently prevailing impulse is to almost exclusively blame the He -- regardless. Hogwash. Brioche is the ultimate home wrecker.

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9 out of 11 people found the following review useful:
Real Life, 11 November 2005

Author: speedo58 from United States

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

I found "Damage" to be very authentic in its depictions. At the outset, the family seems perfectly normal, insular, self-absorbed, bored by lack of challenge and predictable patterns of action whether socially or sexually. The father is at that dangerous point in middle age, where so many men become disaffected with careers, marriages, children, past interests: The mother,whose true love in life in her son, which while not having reached the point of physical incest, is as obsessive as the father's later actions; the son, who grieves for a closer relationship with his father who knows he is second best in his wife's eyes; the daughter who is probably the sharpest one of all; the daughter's boyfriend with his headphones...all show the detachment so often seen in family relationships.

When the son introduces his sophisticated, unscrupulous girlfriend into the mix it is an impending train wreck . She is a serial man killer, probably once in actuality, we are given to believe, in the death of her brother, and figuratively many times, as warned by her mother to the father-in-law-to-be. She is the pursuer and Fleming is the pursued. She is emotionally cold but sexually insatiable. This is frequently the outcome of sexual abuse at the hands of a sibling.

The mood, scenery, and music were all well-orchestrated and the actors were all excellent. The wife's anguish is an outstanding performance.

Jeremy Iron's wonderful wreck of a face can convey dissolution better any other actor.

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