Fresh Damage

Monday is about movies (sometimes TV). This is about ditching "Obsession" to revisit its source material ("Damage"). They don't make movies like it anymore. They're not really allowed to...

A couple of months back, Netflix announced an erotic mini-series called Obsession. Even with its decent-enough cast (Indira Varma, Charlie Murphy) I’d have not batted either eyelid were it not for the fact that this was a remake of the 1992 film, Damage.

I don’t know how, or why I found Damage at the time – but I did. I must have seen it on release in New Zealand on VHS, so probably sometime in 1993. I was a high school student. And there was some titillation to be had from watching the “Erotic Thriller”. Blame Basic Instinct, and Sharon Stone’s immediate follow-up, Sliver. Blame Madonna in Body of Evidence and the horrific – but “wonderful” – Boxing Helena. These were the films. And there were many others. We couldn’t get our hands on porn films, we weren’t supposed to, we probably didn’t really want to for that matter, the times we had seen an old-fashioned porno VHS had been strange, and not in a beguiling way. But the “Erotic Thriller” had actual storyline, and acting, and yet it had something racy about it; was a bit naughty. Like horror films, it was one upmanship just to tell our mates that we had been able to see the thing!

That, I have to assume, was the backdrop to me seeing Damage at the age of 15 or 16.

It's somewhere between Basic Instinct and Boxing Helena – in that it’s naughty and horny and a well-told story with a  wonderful cast (Instinct) and it’s also a bit fucking absurd too (Helena).

Hi-gloss trash. Which is the sort of film I really love. Damage has sat with me 30 years. I’ve thought about it often. And yet I had never felt the need to rewatch it.

Until this weekend.

I thought about finishing Obsession – I’d watched two episodes of it, and it was laughable. So bad. Still, it’s not often I don’t finish something like that, I love a bit of a hate-watch, a grudge-watch, and then there’s the wallpaper-TV of finishing something off while I write in the background, or search TradeMe for unnecessary bargains. In the case of Obsession, I just couldn’t do it. It ironically pushed me so far from obsession as to render me impotent, in a movie-watching sense.

And then, during the week, I had received the Blu Ray of Damage, it’s part of the ongoing [imprint] reissue series of quality dramas and thrillers.

So I sat down to watch the film after doing the day’s chores, and walking the dog, and getting the most of the unseasonable sunshine.

Damage tells the story of Dr. Stephen Fleming. This Stephen Fleming is not the former New Zealand cricket captain and TV heat pump salesman. Rather, this fictional character is a physician turned politician. He’s a conservative, being groomed to one day be the Prime Minister of England. His father-in-law is moneyed and influential, and so is Fleming himself. His wife is catalogue-perfect, and they’ve raised the correct amount of well-behaved children.

Then Fleming meets Anna Barton. She is the fiancée of his son Martyn. But Stephen quickly becomes obsessed with her. They get to rooting. Almost straight away. A torrid tryst with many thrusts. Stephen has his son’s fiancée spreadeagled on the floor, and over several lunchtimes. He even follows his son and partner on their holiday to France. Spying on them basically, creeping around like an obsequious perv (if there is such a thing; and if there can be such a thing then Jeremy Iron is of course the perfect casting choice).

Anna has told Stephen she is damaged. She has told him that her brother fantasised about her, to the point of killing himself. She tells Dr. Politician that damaged people are dangerous because they know how to survive.

In 2023, we can’t really run with these sorts of things anymore, which is part of Obsession’s great failing. It should really have been called 15 Shades of Beige, so watered down was it from Grey’s 50!

Damage, on the other hand, is relentless. It is disturbing. And it’s grim as all fuck. And christ there’s a lot of fucking in it too.

Veteran French filmmaker Louis Malle made Damage right near the end of his career. A career that had seen him make Elevator To the Gallows aka Ascenseur pour l'échafaud  in the late 1950s (a film I know best for its improvised Miles Davis score – which is legendary) and then classic indie films like My Dinner With Andre and Alamo Bay as well as a range of documentary features.

Jeremy Irons, the perfect picture of emotional detachment – his obsession driving him, but barely ever remembering to tell his face – is joined by Juliette Binoche as Anna, Miranda Richardson as his wife, Ingrid. And Rupert Graves as his son, Martyn.

They’re all wonderful actors, they’d all already done great things, and would go on to so many more. It’s a dream cast. The music is by Zbigniew Preisner (Three Colours, At Play In The Fields of the Lord, Secret Garden) who I have only known to do great things. And its script was written by the award-winning playwright David Hare (taken from Josephine Hart’s 1991 novel of the same name).

But the film sits on the split hips of Irons and Binoche. They fuck. And they stare. They fuck. And stare. Fuck. And stare. And between them they barely care. She is damaged. He is her new damage. She is damaging him as a way to forget about her past damage. He is damaging his entire family and career and life, but such is his obsession that he cannot care. His cold, privileged, distanced stare has had him not caring forever. Now at least his pulse-fuse has been lit. And that is doing it for him. No matter the cost.

Damage is a creepy car-crash of a film. You watch, and worry for the denouement. It can’t end well. And of course it doesn’t. And it’s an over-the-top shock every time.

Miranda Richardson won a Bafta and was nominated for an Oscar for an incredible shriek of grief – and possibly for the second coldest line of the film. She says that in the end they both lost someone important to them: She – her son. Her husband – his mistress.

But the coldest line comes in the final narration. Staring at a giant picture of himself, his son, and their shared desire, Irons’ character tells us that he only saw Anna one other time. She was in an airport with her husband and child. He reckons she was barely anything this time. His life ruined. And the lives of several others far worse off. His career, too, gone. He calmly says, that noticing her this time the damage and danger was no longer apparent, in fact she, “was no different from anyone else."

And that’s how the film finishes.

Thirty years on, Damage gut-punched me even harder. It’s so grim and cruel and cold. And yet there’s something so delicious about how absolutely miserable and rotten it is. That’s filmmaking. It dances on the edge of the absurd too. Gloriously so.