Damage - Under Review

A transgressive sex thriller funded by the National Lottery. Oh, how I miss the 1990s...

Damage (1992)
Adapted by David Hare from Josephine Hart’s novel, Damage is directed by Louis Malle, the Oscar-nominated auteur responsible for Au Revoir Les Enfants, Le Souffe Au Coeur, Lacombe Lucien and Atlantic City. And with leading man Jeremy Irons having received a Best Actor Academy Award a couple of years earlier - for Reversal Of Fortune - and his co-stars reading like a Who’s Who of the day’s finest European actors, it’s little wonder hopes were high for this, a film in part funded by the National Lottery.

But back to that cast. Juliette Binoche, Miranda Richardson, Rupert Graves, David Thewlis, Peter Stormare - it’s quite a thing to see these thrusting young talents rubbing shoulders with such greats of yesteryear as Leslie Caron, Julian Fellowes and Ian Bannen. But while it has quality running all the way through it, the remarkable thing about Damage in any way owing anything to the fruits of Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street summit is its subject matter.

For Malle’s movie is the account of a highly erotic, shockingly graphic affair that Irons’ character - a married cabinet minister, no less - conducts with Binoche, essaying the fiancée of said minister’s son. Knowing what we know of the Tory cabinets of the 1980s and ‘90s, one can but imagine how those MPs felt who attended the premiere. Presumably the carpet wasn’t the only thing that was bright red that evening.

Skullduggery aside, Damage is a film both captivating and troubling. It will perhaps come as no surprise that the best thing about it is Irons, here at the peak of his moving acting powers. Indeed, Damage forms part of a cycle of films in which Irons plays seemingly respectable men whose education and baring blinds acquaintances to their frankly shocking flaws.

So get hold of Dead Ringers, Reversal Of Fortune, Adrian Lynne’s remake of Lolita and Damage, and you too can enjoy an afternoon of Jeremy Irons’s sick puppy cinema. A shower afterwards is advisable.