Damage · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The film keeps looking at a banister.

Stairwells, landings, the rail of a staircase: Biziou gives them attention out of all proportion to anything the plot does with them, and you register it as a tic. Then a man falls down that architecture and dies. The tic turns out to have been the subject — not the affair, but the building the affair was conducted inside.

Deleuze has a name for what Damage is doing, and it is not the one you would expect for a film about adultery. He called it the impulse-image, and filed it under naturalism. The idea is plain once you see it work. In most films a character perceives a situation and acts to change it; the action belongs to the person. In the impulse-image the drive does the acting and the person is merely what it acts through. Not desire pursued — appetite running a man. Deleuze built the concept out of Stroheim, Buñuel and Joseph Losey — which matters here, because Malle's two structural ancestors are Losey and Pinter's The Servant and Accident.

Naturalism, in his account, always lays two worlds over one another. There is the derived milieu: a real place, furnished and dated, with manners. Stephen's is complete — panelled rooms, inherited furniture, a ministerial office behind glass, the country house, the constituency obligations. Every surface in it asserts continuity. Underneath sits the originary world: a bare place with no history, where the drive is at home and nothing needs explaining. In Damage that world has an address. Anna's flat is modern and near-empty, unfurnished in a way that reads as refusal rather than poverty, and the scenes there are staged frontally and statically, two people in a room, close to ritual. Stephen's transit between the two spaces is the plot. Not a figure for the plot. The plot is a commute.

That also answers the oldest complaint about the film, that Binoche's Anna is a blank where a motive should be. Naturalism does not run on motives. It runs on symptoms. Leslie Caron gets essentially one scene and delivers the key, the account of Anna's brother, and after it Anna's conduct stops being a set of choices available for judgement and becomes a pattern being re-run. Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive. Deleuze's name for the shape such a film traces is the line of slope: naturalism only goes downhill, and the descent does not reverse. Watch the energy after the fall. The cutting slows. Everything is aftermath, as though the film had been concussed. Stephen ends abroad, alone, in a room dominated by an enlarged photograph of the three of them — a fetish in the strict sense, a relic blown up to be lived inside, the last thing the drive has left to feed on.

The framing carries the argument too. Deleuze treats the frame as a closed set, a composition built as a system of information rather than a view, which is what Losey and Pinter bequeathed to English cinema: the house as a power diagram shot through banisters and doorways, so that where a man stands in a frame states where he stands in a class. Biziou's recurring unit is the threshold. Stephen seen through a doorway, Anna at the far end of a corridor, a conversation watched from the next room, glass everywhere. Visible and separated at once. Then the affair dismantles that system. The sex is underlit, shot on a shallow plane that dissolves the room, cut rhythmically rather than for spatial continuity, sometimes to near-abstraction of limbs and light. Deleuze would call the result an any-space-whatever of the disconnected kind: space that has stopped being a place and become an affect. Stephen's abandonment of the world is never stated. It is a focal length.

Two faces do the rest. Deleuze distinguishes the reflexive face, a surface holding a single quality, from the intensive face, features moving under pressure toward a threshold. Irons is the first, a stillness so complete that small breaks in it register as violence; Binoche matches him with a deliberate vacancy. Richardson's Ingrid is the second, and the film hands her the whole discharge it has withheld for ninety minutes. That the Academy and BAFTA converged on the one performance operating outside the embargo is itself a reading of the film.

The catastrophe is the finest piece of craft in the film, and it is a Deleuzian index of lack: an ellipsis that points at what we are not shown. No coverage, no build, no cutaway to a face that would let us prepare. The event takes about as long as such events take and the cut out is immediate. Malle and John Bloom lift this almost move for move from Accident, where the fatal crash is a sound over a held exterior and the reaction shot is simply withheld. Behind it stands Bazin's oldest argument — a cut that tells you how to feel falsifies what it shows. Malle had made that his method in Le souffle au cœur, a level camera declining the judging reaction at the exact moment the culture expects one, and he stages the family scenes here in depth, people crossing behind each other, half-listening, so the room stays legible and the verdict stays yours.

One device changes what kind of object the film is. Irons's voiceover is retrospective and past tense, and it tells you in the first minute that this has already ended. Suspense is spent before it can accrue. What is left is a lectosign: an image that has lost its self-evidence as action and has to be read instead. Which is why the banister registers. Nothing in the frame is happening any more. Everything in the frame is evidence.

The debts run both ways and they are specific. Bloom carried the cutting pattern of The French Lieutenant's Woman over intact: hard entries into scenes already underway, erotic encounters trimmed of build-up and aftermath. Biziou extends the ethic Nykvist set on Pretty Baby, interiors on available window light so the room's ordinary beauty editorialises nothing. The unscored nocturnal seduction goes back to Malle's own Les Amants in 1958 — the film behind Jacobellis v. Ohio and "I know it when I see it," a symmetry worth sitting with, since Damage was cut from NC-17 to R for American release and different audiences watched measurably different films. Forward, Hare's The Hours and The Reader proceed from this mode directly, and Irons in Lyne's Lolita is unthinkable without it, down to hitting the same wall five years later.

Released against Basic Instinct, it became the boundary case that shows what the erotic thriller's machinery was for, by discarding all of it: no crime, no investigation, no schemer, no plot. What it proved is narrower and harder. You can film compulsion without a monster and without a verdict, in good tailoring, inside a ministry, and have it come out a tragedy in the strict sense. Watch the stairs this time. And keep the question the film keeps — whether Anna is a rigorous refusal of psychological reassurance or an absence at the centre, which the coda makes almost unbearable to decide. Stephen sees her once more, years later, and reports that she was unremarkable, like anyone else. She was never worth it. That changed nothing.