Damage (1992)

Best movie of this year hands down!

A Disappointing Continuation

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

I've never supposed that I'll disgust a Binoche characters' movie; I've never believe that Irons could be so lost and clumsy in a role play; I've neither could imagine me so ashamed of others thankful a Male's direction; But the hard true that really hurts everyone who resign yourself to write about their sad trauma is: To the hell with all alleged moral (or immoral, whatever) values about the story, who think that's the point! The tragic drama, here, is only the horrible work played (acting) specially by the (bizarre) love triangle and the movie's direction. Unfortunately, speaking about the love scenes, even in a Brazilian industrialized line production of serial novels is often more credible and maybe include the Mexican ones less laughable. Sorry for saying...

Were I to go along with the analysis/theorising surrounding this title both in the reviews themselves and the more than usual comments in the discussion section I may well remind myself that it was directed by Louis Malle who had already made a film centred on incest rather than one in which incest is merely a factor. Arguably the earlier film was more personal to Malle involving as it did mother and son in the here and now rather than siblings several years in the past. Not having read the novel on which Damage is based I have no idea how large the incest factor featured but the fact that Malle read it and optioned it virtually on publication - the film itself was released within a couple of years of publication - may be pertinent. Judging it just on its merits as a film it is well written, photographed, directed and acted and on balance more art house than multiplex.

Some movies are like a train wreck. Others are like waves on a beach: pretty, predictable, and about just as boring. And then there are some those that leave you wondering what you would've done in that situation. Damage is one such. A powerful British politician has an affair with his son's fiancée, culminating in the son's accidental death (after catching the two in the act, no less). The cold, selfish manner in which the minister and the son's fiancée indulge each others' sexual desires with no thought whatsoever to the lives of the family they destroy is at once compelling and disgusting. It doesn't hurt that casting director Patsy Pollock picked just about the best possible actors for this project. Louis Malle directs, and everything else—the music, the cinematography, the sets—helped create a brilliant piece of art. Now this is what a romance should be like—powerful enough to destroy empty if socially successful lives… not the kind of insipid mush Hollywood loves to churn out season after season.

Take overwrought Oedipal stuff about a British minister sleeping with his son's fiancé, and subdue to a cold eroticism that holds no satisfaction in the sweat-soaked bedspreads. Break this up in so many anxieties for each character, past and present, and center around a quest for images that were dear but never quite mourned. The son wishing his disaffected father was passionate, but which we know he is exactly where he shouldn't be; her in turn, accepting to expiate the image that wracked her life with guilt by marrying it. His wife, doubly aghast, who has to mourn about the wrong loved one. So it makes some sense that Louis Malle was drawn to this project. The subtle portraits mirrored against each other in a way that they reveal a larger broken humanity, like in Atlantic City so long ago.But it does remain a film that rests with these images we are seeing, polished again to a certain cold beauty but without a certain nuance to entertain. We are meant to be heavily involved on an emotional basis for this to work, and though decent, haven't we got so many films like this?