DAMAGE, with Jeremy Irons, Juliette Binoche, Miranda Richardson and Rupert Graves. At Majestic and Harbour City. Directed by Louis Malle.
OH FOR the days of Brief Encounter when the British upper lip was truly stiff and you could base a whole film on the fact that two people did not actually have sex. Damage is the tale of a stiff upper lip set truly aquiver by a pouting Gallic love kitten.
If you took the sex away you would have not so much a brief encounter as a brief film concentrating on people being nasty to each other in depressingly middle-class situations.
There is a lot of sex in Damage, hardly surprising once you learn it is about a Conservative MP (see Cecil Parkinson, Harvey Proctor, David Mellor) in the throes of menopause. Stephen Fleming (Jeremy Irons) is the ideal family man, happy with the regular, unexciting lifestyle he leads, stable in an undemanding marriage to Ingrid (Miranda Richardson) and happy to be pursuing his successful political career.
Until Anna arrives on the scene.
Anna is played by the persistently uninspiring Juliette Binoche (last seen in Leos Carax' embarrassingly pretentious Les Amants du Pont Neuf ) whose Thespian abilities seem to stretch no further than giving smouldering glances before taking her clothes off. Certainly, in Damage, her part demands little more than this, despite the film's persistent references to Anna's complex past and personality.