Damage (1992) was on cable the other day, so I gave it another shot and tried to keep my promise of watching the damn thing already, but the plain fact is, I just don't like it. I don't have a hate-on for this picture, but the characters are so sketchy! I appreciate the idea: the more vaguely drawn they are, the more primeval the emotions, but I hated these people!
You can see there was some thought put into Jeremy and Binoche's love scenes, to make it an elegant ballet of body language, but maybe there's not a lot of genuine chemistry between these two. I know I'm a bit hard on directors about how they portray sex in the movies, and obviously it must be one of the hardest things to get right, otherwise they wouldn't so consistently fail. In this movie the problem seems to be the contrast between the rough opera of their bodies thrashing about the room and the frigidity of their facial expressions. In Jeremy's case, I think it's meant to convey his mournfulness, whereas in Juliette's it's probably to get across the message that she is thinking their love-making, keeping a cool head about it, and not really giving in to the experience either physically or emotionally. But the result is a bit frigid. I realize directors can't ask quality actors to go all porny and orgasmic, as it would be disrespectful to their dignity as persons; but the result is they look like they're faking it.
The way Jeremy sort of throws her about the house, against the walls, against the kitchen sink... Can anyone concentrate on pleasure when one's head is being repeatedly banged against the floor, even if the floor is carpeted? You can actually hear the thud! But the idea is to show us that she always bounces back unscathed. I like her sense of fun. She reminds me of a cat, laughing at her lover, playfully climbing up the wall, rolling on the table, kicking up her legs with sexy black stockings in the air.
Miranda Richardson is great, as always, as Jeremy's wife. She's a hard woman who doesn't suffer fools, so she no longer respects or loves her husband. Poor Jeremy is very rich and very unhappy in his golden gaol. I hate to say it, but he made a career of playing these masochist types, and he's just not very good at it. The only time I really liked him was in Die Hard, where he was having fun robbing banks and not feeling guilty or conflicted about anything. I console myself thinking he can't be that miserable in real life (I loved it when Laura Linney said in an interview that for a while she was typecast as an uptight. She said, "I'm an actor, how uptight can I be?" That was an eye-opener.)
This second attempted viewing of the film confirmed my first impression that Juliette Binoche is playing Lulu*, the beautiful girl as a destroyer -- a fresh-faced woman-child with the soul of a femme fatale. It took me this time, however, to realize what a psycho she is! There's a scene where, after making love, she does a full-disclosure to Jeremy: she was in an incestuous relationship with her brother, who killed himself because he couldn't bare having to let go of her. She decided to get over it and live her life. EDIT: And OMG, I just realized that's another thing she and Nastassja Kinski in Cat People have in common: not only are they androgynes, at first innocently unaware of their own fantastic power, but later learning to use it in their benefit to the detriment of others -- they also share an incestuous past with a sibling. Is this a pattern in art and in life? Is the beautiful girl as a destroyer incestuous?
"Be careful with damaged people", she warns him, "They're not afraid of anything, because they know they can survive". We realize that her plan is to marry Jeremy's son and that she got involved with the father because she knew instinctively that the mother would see through her (as she did) and she needed an ally in the family. What better way to get the father on her side than to make love to him and make him her accomplice? She communicates her plan with a sweet smile on her face. Psycho!
My favorite scene (that you can watch under the cut, where it says "Read more...") is when Jeremy goes to her apartment and confesses his obsession for her. I was reminded of Roger Ebert's insightful analysis on how you can create a totally different feeling in the viewer simply by the way you choose to position and frame the actors in a scene. Speaking for myself, I find that positioning someone in a corner instantly creates fear -- it doesn't have to be as dramatic as in this photo by Big Fat Rat, but you get the idea: although it's the person we're watching who is pushed against the corner, it's us, the viewers, who feel under imminent attack.
In the movie, although Juliette does not have her back against the wall, the camera does film her against the corner of the room. The half-shade and brown tones also evoke Leonardo da Vinci's chiaro schuro sfumato to me, and Leonardo's style always made me scared.
Juliette is waiting, like a spider, for Jeremy to come up, tranquilly confident that he has fallen into her trap. She sits regally in that geometric environment of hard, straight lines converging to her, like an Egyptian sphinx. She is self-satisfied and unafraid, Jeremy is in a paroxysm of anguish. "You must never worry, I will always be here", she says. "Who are you?" Jeremy asks. She must be the mythical mother, no?
From Camille Paglia's "Vamps & Tramps" book, "No Law in the Arena" chapter:
"What are the roots of obsession? To interpret the crazed idolatry that turns into hostility and destruction, you need to immerse yourself in the psychological world of great plays and novels -- Iago's mysterious motivation, Othello's paroxysmic rage. Men who kill the woman they love have reverted to pagan cult. She whom a man cannot live without has become a goddess, an avatar of his half-divinized, half-demonized mother, a magic fountain of cosmic creativity. Without her, he cannot exist; he is obliterated. That anyone else should have her love, or even her gaze or presence, he cannot endure. It is an injustice, and so she becomes unjust; she must be punished. He interprets her refusal to see him as an act of war, so he lays siege to her citadel. To invade it and force himself into her attention restores his identity and importance. To harass, upset, and even kill her is to perpetuate his relationship with her. He would rather be hated than ignored. Like Richard III, he glories in his monstrosity, his ostracism by humanity. He goes willingly to prison and even to the gas chamber: this is "for her" and their love."
Jeremy's character does sacrifice everything for her sake, but in the end Binoche has destroyed everyone in this family and survived unscathed as usual. Jeremy finds her years later, and she's married with kids. The cat always lands on her feet.
* Do check out this definitive article on Louise Brooks by Gordon Thomas, if you haven't already.
Thanks to oReiDePaus for uploading this!
7:53 minutes.
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