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Damage Customer Reviews (1 - 3 of 31 Reviews)

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This movie hurt, hurt in its absorption, and hurt in its aftermath. Much like "Betrayal", also starring Jeremy Irons, but far, far more devastating. Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche were GOOD. "Damage" all around.

A Great Sexy Movie
This is one of the best ones with Jeremy Irons. The girl is scalding hot, and the taboo nature of the story is very compelling -- especially the first time watching it. A great date movie for the 8th date.

Self-obsessed?
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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