When Desire Turns Dangerous — The Story Behind Damage
Louis Malle’s Damage, released in 1992, was a catalyst for the creation of a new genre in cinema. Starring Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche, the movie was not a forbidden love story in the traditional sense. It was a clinical examination of a love so obsessive it devours everything, including the two people involved. It was also a controversy. The film was a striking combination of psychoanalysis, eroticism, and tragedy, and it provoked enough passion to divide critics and audiences and make for uncomfortable conversations at dinner.
Finally, the most interesting part about Damage is not the story that is unfolded on screen. It is, rather, the story behind the screen. The emotional risks the actors took, the creative risks Malle took, and, most importantly, the exposing of the soul the entire cast and crew endured in the service of their art, that they so lovingly framed as tragedy disguised as love.
The Anatomy of a Forbidden Affair
A superficial analysis of Damage might confine it to a simple story of infidelity. Stephen Fleming (Jeremy Irons) has an enviable life. A successful career as a British parliamentarian, an affectionate wife Ingrid (Miranda Richardson), and two grown children, Stephen’s life is polished, predictable, and suffocatingly perfect. His world is flawless. Then Anna Barton (Juliette Binoche), his son’s new fiancée, enters the scene. She is a woman whose beauty seems to carry sadness like perfume.
The first meeting between Stephen and Anna is charged with quiet tension — not flirtation, but recognition. Each seems to sense the other’s loneliness. Their relationship is born not of passion, but of emotional vacancy and secrecy. Stephen, long starved of risk and real feeling, becomes addicted to the danger Anna represents. Anna, a self-destructive emotional risk and control seeker, and self-violence inflicted through unsavory companionship, is drawn to Stephen. She is, after all, haunted by a traumatic past.
As their affair grows, the story begins to spiral. One moment, we are in the silence of longing, the next, we are in the frenzy of a desperate phone call, and in the next, we are in a love that borders on an illness. The moment of the plot twist arrives when Martyn, Stephen’s son, is privy to the affair’s details. The ensuing tragedy is so abrupt that, for a time, the film seems to stop and hold its breath. What remains is silence. What follows is the disarray of every illusion of control that is wrecked.
Jeremy Irons: A Man Who Knew Restraint
Irons was a man of restraint. And a surgeon’s precision was needed when it came to describing Stephen Fleming. Having gained recognition from roles that fused intelligence with darkness in films like Reversal of Fortune and Dead Ringers, Irons played the man perfectly whose composed exterior was in stark contrast with the raging storm within. Irons didn’t just play Stephen. He constructed a character from the ground up and he was meticulous when it came to Stephen. Hidden behind the hundreds of emotional folds of numbness, he believed that the desire was less about lust, and more about the need to feel something. The tension of restraint is evident in every gesture, the stillness of the hands and the quiver of the voice, and the eyes that have lapsed in contact and never meet hers until it is too late.
Jonathon Irons’ intense preparations are one of the many aspects of his craft that distinguished him. Rather than discussing the work at hand, Irons would pace quietly, rehearsing in his mind. A member of the crew recalled one of the most intimate scenes in the film, when he said, “Let the shame guide him — not the choreography.” This discomfort that he sought was the magic ingredient that made a film, which verged on voyeurism, realistic.
Juliette Binoche: The Mystery No One Could Tame
At 28, Juliette Binoche was already an accomplished actress, having played the lead in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Coming off that remarkable performance, Binoche did not disappoint in the film Damage. She played a role that required a greater emotional exposure than anything she had done before, while at the same time retaining an imperturbable surface. Juliette achieved that confidence through the emotional framework she built for Anna, which she contextualized well beyond anything the script required. In her ‘Ghostbook’ she recorded all the possible emotional and psychological abandonments Anna had suffered. This made the calm haunting: the void in the chaos of her life. Binoche was also instrumental in the haunting line, which she said like a confession: “Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.”
Malle often filmed scenes with extended, uninterrupted takes and with Irons’s chemistry, the partnership execution was easy. The director once stated, “I wanted them to exhaust each other emotionally, not just physically.” Binoche was reported to have unexpectedly broken down during one take and went on to improvise well past the end of the scripted scene, a moment of great power that was kept in the final cut.
A Director’s Dance with Controversy
The Lovers (1958) to Pretty Baby (1978) and beyond, Louis Malle was certainly not new to taboo. With Damage, he was dissecting desire, stripped of all its glamour and focused purely on its consequences. Malle’s presence on set and directing style was intimate to the point of being invasive. For the film’s erotic scenes, he requested closed set and kept even the cinematographer at a distance, making the scene a voyeuristic experience for the audience. “I wanted the audience to feel they were intruding,” he said, in reference to the feeling he wanted to evoke.Working on the film proved to be an emotionally draining experience for all involved. Miranda Richardson, who played Stephen’s wife, stated that filming the confrontation scene, when Ingrid finds out that Stephen is having an affair, was particularly difficult. Her performance was so impressive that it earned her an Academy Award nomination; this was aided by director Malle’s decision not to have rehearsal prior to filming, so Richardson’s performance could have an unrefined quality that Malle desired.
A Film That Divided the World
When Damage was first shown to the public, critics surveyed it with both anger and admiration. Damage was praised for being a groundbreaking psychological film, while others simply described it as soft-core pornography. Initially, the British Board of Film Classification wanted to censor certain scenes of the film for being too sexually explicit, but Director Malle defended his work by claiming that the sexual content was necessary for the story.
Viewers of the film also expressed mixed reactions. While some described it as liberating for not softening the emotional aspects of love, others claimed the film was disturbing and painful to watch. Regardless, Damage was one of the most talked about films in Europe in the 1990’s, expressing the destructive quality of passion in a bold way.
Imported European cinema was penetrating the cinephile world in India during the early 90s, and Damage was the film being whispered about. It was not just the film’s eroticism that attracted attention, but the film’s depiction of emotional repression, which perfectly resonated in a culture that celebrates restraint over confession.
The making of Damage was not without difficulties. The cast was forced to work in confined spaces; hotel rooms and dimly lit corridors would simulate the emotional suffocation of their characters. Malle is said to have kept the windows closed during long takes, wanting the atmosphere to feel “thick with silence.”
The infamous staircase scene is one of the most talked about moments in the film and it took two days to film. Despite the physical exhaustion it required, both Irons and Binoche insisted on performing it without doubles. After the final take, the crew members described how both actors sat quietly on the floor for nearly ten minutes, not from emotional discomfort but, from emotional exhaustion, they simply could not speak.
Unspoken connections were developed on the set as well. Despite portraying love rivals in the film, Richardson and Binoche used to spend their lunches discussing literature and emotional psychology. “We weren’t rivals off-screen,” remarked Richardson. “We were two women trying to understand how far the heart can bear.”
The Echo That Never Faded.
Even after more than thirty years, Damage is still as haunting and memorable as it was on the first day it was released. It is not a film about infidelity. It is about the intricacies of desire and the fragility of love, and love, without any limitations, turns into a weapon.
It was an endurance test for everyone involved in the film. For the actors, the director, and the audience, who were made uncomfortable and forced to decide whether to look away or to look closer. It was a test of endurance.
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