Certified Copy

We begin this film with an Italian book on display before a plain gray wall. The book is entitled Copia conforme, and its companions are an unmanned table, an unmanned microphone, a dirty chimney, and the aura of an imminent press conference. This is indeed what occurs. A man with some resemblance to this Italian-American director addresses us (we still cannot see the audience) in Italian about a British scholar with the plain name of James Miller, whose apparent tardiness "cannot be excused because of the traffic since his room is upstairs." Miller appears at last, to a small group, about forty people, most of whom are women. At this talk, conducted in English, Miller makes almost the same joke as his predecessor but says he "walked here." He also comments perfunctorily on the weather because Italians would expect no less of an Anglo-Saxon. Then he takes a swipe at the literary taste of his fellow Englishmen and we understand that his book, which won "best international essay of the year," has been a limited success. In fact, "limited success" may be the best caption for James Miller (William Shimell).

Suave-looking, if considerably more attractive from far than from up close, Miller quickly decides he has already lost his audience and begins luxuriating in pseudophilosophical mumbo-jumbo ("It is difficult to write about art: there are no fixed points of reference, there are no immutable truths"). As he is about to deliver a prepared statement in Italian thanking Marco Lenzi – the man who introduced him and translated his book – a woman comes and sits in one of the two front row seats marked riservato (Lenzi took the first one), and is shot a look by Lenzi that acknowledges the decorum of such an act. We do not know this at the time, but this may be the film's most important moment since it safely excludes one interpretation that the plot will come to suggest. Soon thereafter a young boy of maybe twelve enters the room and begins to bug the woman (Juliette Binoche), who is very obviously his mother. The boy will spend a long time looking over at his mother, who jokes with Lenzi and pendulates from subrisive attention to Miller to fiddling with her handbag in that unique way a woman has of signaling her boredom. 

In the meantime, Miller drones on about "the authenticity of art" (a tired modern topos): he mentions the origin of the word 'origin' (the Latin orīrī, 'to arise, be born'); compares our art productions to us since we are "DNA replicas of our forebears"; and underscores that certifying the authenticity of the work of great artists in all epochs and disciplines has become a most important vocation – and I think you get the idea. But when our pontificating expert lists the four criteria by which a work of art can be certified, the woman is beckoned to leave the room by her son, which she does, all the while looking back in mocking amusement at our speaker. In a marvelous twist, Miller has only listed two criteria ("the form and shape of the artefact"; "the material of which it is made") when the presentation is interrupted by a cell phone's ring – Miller's phone – that he actually answers. We shift scenes and see the woman outside in the Tuscan streets walking several yards in front of her son, who barely looks up from his handheld game console. They sit down for a cheeseburger and the son, still not looking up, asks her casually how many of Miller's books she bought. "Six," she replies, as if the number held some significance. The interrogation continues in that vein that drives teenagers crazy, to wit, when they know that their parents are hiding something from them and won't divulge it – precisely what teenagers do all day to their parents, but anyway. The woman states she will give a copy to a friend, her son protests that the friend already has it, and she mentions an "autographed copy" (exemplaire dédicacé) as her aim. Then the son knows that she simply wants to see the fellow again and calls her on it. She does not deny the charge, and we have our plot.

With Lanzi's help Miller visits the woman in her underground store, very much a Roman catacomb replete with busts and other antiques. Something bothers him about this place – perhaps simply that it so resembles a crypt – so he spurns her repeated offer to remain there and ejects both of them into "the fresh air." "Your invitation," he reminds her, "said nothing about an antiques shop." She is visibly upset by this whole sequence, strangely reminiscent of a man's failed attempt to keep a desired woman in what he believes is his irresistible bachelor pad, but which to her seems very much like a trap. They then set off on one of those surreal drives so popular in the work of some directors (Kiarostami is no exception) where certain peculiar aspects of the two interlocutors will be revealed. From this first isolated exchange we can deduce one thing (a few other things will be deduced later on): the woman, who is never named, is not trying to impress Miller by allowing him to prattle on about aesthetics; she is trying to become his muse. Every time he speaks abstractly, she slips him a concrete example, usually something simpler and more grounded. She accuses him of trying to prove the unprovable not to nettle him but to see whether he might indeed listen and come down to earth next to her. Of course, he rebuts such accusations soundly and consistently. "I'm afraid," he says with the tone of an emergency room surgeon breaking some bad news, "there's nothing very simple about being simple." This implies that it is harder for someone of impeccable taste to debase himself with everyday culture than for someone ensconced in that same mundane rubbish to be elevated towards the sublime, an argument in favor of art's transformative power upon the human soul. Miller then promises her his favorite joke, whose punchline about a soda bottle she guesses and which, anyway, is so insipid we truly hope that his calling it his "favorite joke" was the real attempt at humor (his sour reaction suggests it wasn't). They arrive in a small town renowned for weddings, young couples, and a painting that was once thought to date to Roman times then exposed fifty years ago as an eighteenth-century forgery, and somehow we sense that although Miller has a train at nine that night, we will not be leaving that small town any time soon.

It is here as well that the film begins to hint at another plot, at the resemblance of this nameless woman's son to this bleary-eyed Englishman, at the consequences of raising a family, at the omission of the son's surname in the dedication of that autographed tome. Is the son a "certified copy" of the father? Are we witnessing a long-suffering married couple fallen out of love? The indentured servitude to a one-night-stand that bequeathed a child? Two people having fun while playing fantasy roles that have no kinship with their realities? The rest of the film predicates this unusual indeterminacy, yet the first fifteen minutes of Certified Copy ensure only one plausible explanation to its subsequent events, which will not be revealed here. Suffice it to say that those who love ambiguity may love this film, even if there is no real ambiguity at all – that is, unless the characters are asylum-ripe. The broad boilerplate notions of art are belied by the petty, private hell, or facsimile of a petty, private hell, unleashed by its second half, which, we suppose, is meant to show how little aesthetic theory has to do with life or art. Many internet sources indicate some professional actors were considered for the role of Miller (Shimell is no stranger to the limelight being a well-known opera singer, but is not a trained actor), which would have made the whole affair incredibly pretentious and melodramatic. As it is, the balance is perfect: Binoche, who flutters among English, French, and Italian at a hummingbird's pace, maintains her mildly histrionic posturings; whereas Shimell must simply find a way to handle them without the ease of someone long accustomed to disguise. The result is that we come to think that the woman is not being truthful and that Miller, for all his ridiculous aphorisms (the most quoted will surely be from a "Persian poem" he supposedly happens to know), may be the victim of a harridan's whims. Towards the dead center of the film, a supporting character detects that husband and wife are indeed seated in her café and offers some well-meant advice about what makes a man tick ("Men need work: it distracts them and we can lead our lives"; "It can't be all that bad if your only complaint is that your husband works too much"; "When there's no other woman we begin to see work as our rival") and we believe her because old women, especially old women in movies, tend to be conduits of the truth. And what about what happened five years ago near the replica of a famous statue? After all, without that revelation in Florence, there would have been no original to copy.

Caché

There is a lovely French term, bourgeois-bohème (often abbreviated as "bobo"), used to describe someone of privileged living but rebellious, often intrepid ideals, which can be taken as either a compliment or plain evidence of what happens to people when they become financially successful (an American journalist unwittingly created the same portmanteau). The whiff of money and a carefree life are often enough to corrupt those who were rotten to begin with. But for those of us with no interest in what holes money can punch through the human soul, the price is much greater. Most people will succumb to money as most people will succumb to the allure of sensuality; after all, money and sex are the two easiest things in the world to enjoy. The bobos of the world are, however, caught between what they believe in and what is expected of them given their societal status: they will be sensitive to any charges of selling out, but equally empowered by the thought of using their influence to do good instead of buying furs and patronizing boutiques. In France, a country that still reads and was awarded for its diligence with the latest Nobel Prize winner, television has all the usual farces, police shows, and imbecilic pseudo-news programs, as well as something that the United States lacks – literary debates. As pretentious as they sound and sadistically boring to viewers without a good command of both spoken and written French, these shows are a mainstay of French culture even though many of the works discussed are not worth retaining in the dark forests of our memory (as most books, given the glut of mediocrity on the market, are better left untouched). Yet the mere fact of their existence is a very bobo event: expensive television (often prime) time oddly paired with the highest form of human inquiry. How very telling, then, that the host of such a program is the subject of this remarkable film.

Our hero – if that is really the right word – is Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil), a plain French name for a plain French mind. Georges moderates a very popular literary program on television and his comfortable house in Paris's thirteenth arrondissement has wall-to-wall shelves of those wonderful Gallimard and Minuit editions so familiar to students of France. His wife Anne (a suddenly heavier Juliette Binoche) and twelve-year-old son Pierrot waft in and out of Georges's everyday routine, but his primary focus is the maintenance of his own golden reputation. This is a typically bobo concern: those who believe or once believed in bettering the world often see their success as a justification of their ideals, even if few of those ideals were preserved during their ascent. So Georges and Anne engage in their habitual dinner polemics with their guests – including one friend, Pierre (the late Daniel Duval), who clearly has eyes for Anne – until a strange package arrives. As is common for strange packages there is no return address, nor any clear indication of how it might have arrived on the Laurents' doorstep. Such an event is all the more disconcerting since the package only contains a cassette, and that cassette contains nothing but handheld footage of the house at whose doorstep it was left. Georges is visibly disturbed; Anne thinks one of Georges's loyal viewers has decided to stalk him; Pierrot is nowhere to be found; and nothing more is said until, of course, a second package with more footage appears a few days later. This time we get more information: a child's drawing of a stick figure spitting out what really does look like blood. Anne is confused and now suspects a prank; Georges, however, is terrified. 

Childhood memories swirl and descend upon Georges like some serpentine mist and we begin to peer into his nightmares. He is perhaps six or seven with another boy his age, a boy from North Africa, a boy by the name of Majid. Majid's parents, we learn in snippets, were Algerian farmhands working for the Laurents when they were slain during this notorious Paris massacre. As a last favor, Majid was to be adopted by his parents' employers – something to which Georges, apparently obsessed with his reputation from an early age, was vehemently opposed. What happened then is revealed towards the end of the film, but Georges feels impelled enough by his conscience to track down Majid in his rent-controlled apartment and confront him about the matter. Majid denies any involvement, Georges leaves, and, soon enough, his nightmares become more visceral. A young Majid is now seen spitting blood and beheading a rooster, and in general doing everything he can to seem unadoptable, which makes about as much sense as Georges's claims to Anne that nothing is bothering him and he has taken no action on the tapes. It is here that Georges's true personality emerges. He crosses a street without looking and almost collides with a West African speeding along on his bicycle. Instead of acknowledging their mutual insouciance, perhaps more on his part as the pedestrian, Georges fulminates against this young immigrant who he feels does not belong in his world. Another tape appears and the secret is out: it is a film of Georges and Majid in Majid's apartment. Anne demands details and Georges provides the story of Majid's parents, his threats against Georges, and his eventual placement in an orphanage, all of which doesn't persuade Anne and shouldn't persuade us. Pierrot suddenly goes missing and Georges returns to Majid's apartment to accuse him of kidnapping. How perfect that as Georges's only son vanishes, we finally see Majid's child. A handsome, well-raised, and extremely polite young man, he harbors more than a little resentment towards Georges. Father and son both claim that Georges is way off base even as the son seems to be hiding behind a smirk; Pierrot returns the next day and says he spent the night at a friend's, although his parents never quite ask which friend; then Majid beckons Georges to visit him one last time. And perhaps we should stop our revelations right there.

The brilliance of Caché (for which this earlier Haneke film serves as a study) lies in the confluence of its details and human intentions. Georges and Majid do represent two strands of society, the affluent native (Auteuil, ironically enough, was actually born in Algiers) and struggling immigrant whose only viable chance of advancement resides in his children; Majid's son is a proud North African yet completely French; and the times when Georges could cross a Parisian street and not encounter an immigrant on the other side are long gone. As a survey of what has become of our globalized world the film remains insightful, correct, and admonitory – yet this is all of secondary importance. Its true beauty is reflected in Georges's eyes, the portals to his soul and conscience, portals which his mother (Anne Girardot) knows have not always been the upholders of the ideals he now espouses. Is it a coincidence that, as every review will inform you, caché is French for "hidden"? Or that, in Arabic, Majid means "glorious" or "exalted"? Two highly controversial final scenes that will be discussed for years might suggest otherwise. But then again, only Georges can tell us for sure.

Rendez-vous

Away from light steals home my heavy son,
And private in his chamber pens himself,
Shuts up his windows, locks fair daylight out,
And makes himself an artificial night.

                                                                                                    Romeo and Juliet, I.i

There are star-crossed lovers, lovers cut into little stars, stars that exhale meteors, but the tales of love woven across the centuries of literature remain in our memory because we fear one thing: that the love of which we read will never infect the air of which we breathe. Those who claim that love is but chemical dependency provoked to perpetuate a species have never loved one afternoon or evening on this earth; and though we cannot begrudge them their bitterness their words need not concern us. The love that is high as the sun in day and cautious and hidden as the moon when darkness reigns, this is what each of us desires, however estranged we may feel from the world at large. And however we may speak of teenage infatuation, as exemplified by the most famous couple in literary history, love is a barometer of maturity: it is the ability to know when to cast down one's arms and call off the search. We cannot expect a fourteen-year-old maiden to know anything of love, and the expectation may be equally unreasonable for a rather frisky eighteen-year-old from Toulouse. Which brings us to this film.

The premise may be old hat, but something about it occludes sleaze or cynicism. A young woman, Anne Larrieu, dite Nina (Juliette Binoche), departs her rustic hometown for the bright lights of Paris with the tentative goal of becoming an actress, which is another way of saying she wants to do something where she wouldn't have to be herself. We first see her walking into Gertrude Soissons Real Estate and onto the radar of a rather hapless lad named Paulot (Wadeck Stanczak). Paulot, whose name conjures up a nursery rhyme, quickly develops feelings for her although the signals she sends suggest nymphomania, insouciance, and a certain amount of self-loathing (the most famous being, "the nights I have spent alone in Paris I can count on one hand"). Nina does have one modest role in a bawdy farce, "Tea or cocoa," which is one of the few lines uttered by her character, a ditzy, underdressed French maid, and Paulot is mysteriously presented with an extra ticket. Now anyone with even scant knowledge of female machinations would know that a pretty young girl with an unstable job and no real friends in a city like Paris does not just happen to have an extra ticket. Paulot becomes in short order her bodyguard and confidant but unlike most of the other male characters not her lover. That duty is predominantly left to his enigmatic and self-destructive flatmate, Quentin (the immortally handsome Lambert Wilson).

Quentin's appearance about fifteen minutes in points the film in a more somber direction – precisely the "artificial night" of Shakespeare's play and for good reason. In slow details that reward the viewer's patience, Quentin is revealed to have once been a fine actor in a production of Romeo and Juliet four years prior. His Juliet, a woman we never get to see, was also his lover after rehearsals and the passenger in the car wreck that only he survived.  He is brooding, histrionic, and completely self-absorbed – in other words, a typical actor. When Nina whacks him with a shoe, the camera remains on his face as he bleeds and cackles. We never get to see her expression because it doesn't matter to him and, therefore, not to us. The first time he and Nina make love is preceded by a ridiculous display with a razor, a weapon that will be wielded on different occasions throughout the film, and not only by Quentin. His stalking of Nina ("I get the feeling you've been following me since we met") worsens the tensions between him and poor old Paulot, who end up convening unwillingly at her apartment one fateful morning. After parboiling himself in frenzied platitudes and maniacal grins, Quentin departs to a dog's-eye perspective beneath some bumpers. We never glimpse his body but are simply informed in good theatrical fashion that a death has occurred off-stage, at which point the third act begins with a sad middle-aged gentleman called Scrutzler (Jean-Louis Trintignant). Quentin was once Romeo and the daughter of Scrutzler, whose name evinces an ignorance of German nomenclature, was his Juliet. Scrutzler himself was the director who hand-picked Quentin ("The first minute I saw him, I knew"), and his performance was so impressive that even when Nina re-encounters Fred, her dressing room lover at "Tea or cocoa," Fred remembers just how good Quentin was. So when Nina meets Scrutzler – in the words of Quentin, "a madman who calls me every day trying to save me" – there is only one destiny left to be revealed.   

Romeo and Juliet's quandary, if one may employ such a term, is that they are too young to know better and expiate their sins on the basis of their artlessness. They immerse themselves in second-hand passions because the idea of love is more valuable to die for than the courageous act of life. To her credit, one thing that Nina doesn't wish for is death, perhaps because life has yet to fulfill its promise. On more than one occasion she is accused of being immune to love, owing in no small part to her nightly gambols, and she wonders whether this is true, whether she is doomed to be the halfwitted maid who "always finds something to like about a man." There is enough nudity to satisfy those who feel such a life cannot be accurately depicted by suggestive parlor talk alone, but the flesh that does appear is never gratuitous and always advances the story line (when Paulot finally makes his clumsy, telegraphed move, for example, Nina just begs him to get done with it since he's just like all the rest; naturally, he leaves flustered and appalled). The story line, however, does not quite drift where we think it might go, and again we see that much more effort was exerted in sculpting the film than in naming it. And at some point towards the end it also occurs to the viewer that the actress who has become Juliet has the same name in our reality. Quite a burden for a young actress unless she lives past fourteen.  

The English Patient

This succulent film, winner of a considerable number of awards, is probably one of those few cinematic adaptations which rise above their literary sources.  An unsurprising assessment given that the whole premise is standard modern novel fare: shortly after the Second World War, a severely burned patient (Ralph Fiennes), English only in manner and mastery of the language, lies in a hospital bed in an Italian villa and tells a tale of love lost.  His nurse (Juliette Binoche) indulges him knowing all the while that even in these pacific surroundings he will not last more than a month. The narrative unfolds in pieces, flashbacks of moments that mattered to the Patient, points of emotions and thoughts that seem now, in death’s proximity, essential to understanding his personality and soul.  There is nothing original nor offensive about such a premise, which is ultimately a diary composed by a mystery writer with aesthetic pretensions. The payoff will not nearly be as scintillating as the telling, but that we already know as well.

Over time we come to see that the so-called English Patient is really a Hungarian, Count László de Almásy, and that the love of his short life was a married woman called Katherine Clifton (Kristen Scott Thomas).  Katherine’s fate can only have been tragic in light of the apathy with which the Count faces his final days, but this again is no surprise.  Something so designed for disaster can only be redeemed by art, beautiful prose and ideas woven into lush scenery that spread like nymphaeaceae across a lake.  Speaking at length pains the Count, a devoted student of this Greek historian; so in good literary fashion he shrouds his desires and thoughts in paradigms lifted from books more real to him than the life he is about to relinquish.  In this type of situation even poems, the most touching that his mind could retain, would not be out of place.  But we do not get poems.  The film’s late director smartly substitutes pictures for scenes, especially between Katherine and her lover, and allows his talented cast to improvise on the standard forbidden wartime love theme that in lesser hands could easily have succumbed to some of cinema’s most tedious clichés.  Fiennes and Thomas are not only superb, they are convincing both as a couple (which is easy given their chemistry) and as individuals who will themselves towards doom all the while persuaded that what they have cannot be anything less than right.  The scenes in North Africa, where the real Almásy spent years researching ethnographic obscurities, are gorgeous and filled with just enough chiaroscuro to reinvent the patterns they loosely follow.  Predictably, Katherine’s husband (Colin Firth) is a pitiable creature who is the Hungarian’s inferior in every way; but Almásy is not without his faults.  For all his talent and culture he cannot see how destructive love can be when it becomes a matter of concealment and adventure.  You have nothing when you are not ready to or simply cannot show the world in whose arms you truly wish to die.  And he and Katherine, so in love yet so aware of how unfair life has been, have barely more than that.

Without huddling another work under this review’s shade, I should add that the strength of the film, Katherine and Almásy, is watered down in the book to an affair parallel to another love story, as if mimicking the quartet format made popular by this famous man of letters.  The nurse, whose name is Hana, spends a great deal of the novel intertwined with the sapper Kip (Naveen Andrews), an Anglo-Indian who provides a convenient postcolonial touchstone for the novel’s themes.  Kip is a wise and thoughtful figure, often brooding so that his mood matches the color of his skin – a horrific cliché which should tell you exactly how little effort was put into making him original.  Moreover, as a sapper, it is his task to remove the mines placed beneath the good earth by the barbarian Europeans whose languages he speaks and whose women he has loved.  I should and will leave the matter at that.  There is also another character of considerable force bearing the name of an Italian painter (Willem Defoe).  If the film were an engine, he would certainly be the wrench that derails the whole exercise and makes a few decisions that can only be described as cowardly.  The agenda of this Caravaggio, like that of art itself, is gain.  But while an artist wants to gain in talent and experience to achieve self-perfection, this Caravaggio has no qualms about selling people off for a handful of silver.  And maybe he keeps his hands stretched out towards the sky just a bit too long.

Damage

Love and war are old pastimes; obsession brings forth much more interesting data.  Some may reply that love itself is an obsession, a maniacal urge to experience life’s greatest reward regardless of the personal cost (and as you can see, that last sentence makes as much sense as love).  True enough, obsession often comprises many facets of love, but it is a selfish love, a bitter, corrosive lust that lurks in both the good and the wicked.  Love is always nauséabond; obsession cannot lead to anything good.  We know this and yet, as we watch this magnificent film unravel, as so many reviewers have put it, like a slow-motion car wreck, we cannot look away although (or maybe because) doom for all is veritably assured.

There are no ugly people, scenery, or moments in Damage, as the film itself is obsessed with obsession, with caring about something so much that it slowly engulfs everything else.  For an aesthetic project, this means beauty, and often what accompanies beauty – youth, lust, irreverence, irresponsibility, betrayal, and pain.  Stephen Fleming (Jeremy Irons) is a rising deputy minister who will likely be promoted to the cabinet.  His life has everything a plain, material mind could wish for as well as those things that most every soul needs: a loving spouse (Miranda Richardson), two well–adjusted children (Rupert Graves and Gemma Clark), and a solid marriage based on admiration, respect, and love.  But he has been a responsible and driven workaholic for too many years, ever since he was a "young doctor, doing simple things well."  One day, his son Martyn, a young, handsome newspaper editor, announces he has a new girlfriend, apparently nothing more than the flavor of the month.  This woman is Anna Barton (Juliette Binoche), whose alphabetic name already suggests her primordial importance, and before Martyn can even introduce her to his parents, she approaches Stephen at an official reception.  The look they exchange is one of the most impressive bits of understatement in recent cinematic history.  It says absolutely everything about their relationship, about Anna’s mind and personality, as well as about Stephen’s hard-won position of influence and what he has had to give up to get there.  Their first physical encounter is wordless, the phone call that abets their urges almost as taciturn, and we understand the weird chemical processes programmed into each of us, for many never to be truly unleashed.  This is brute force, animalistic and unstoppable, but there is also much more to this than meets the eye.

For Anna, Stephen is safe.  Apart from being twenty years her senior and married, he is the father of her boyfriend, so they cannot possibly have a relationship glazed with sweet nothings.  He also allows her to indulge her lifelong therapeutic need of fighting possessiveness by cheating.  If you don’t see this unbelievably selfish streak, and how she instigates everything then wants no responsibility for her actions because of the cruel fate of her young brother (a back story that I will not spoil), your ethical standards may need some ironing.  "Damaged people are dangerous," she says with some gusto, "they know they can survive."  Throughout the film, Anna thinks of herself as a tragic figure even though she has enjoyed a privileged if itinerant life, and her mother’s numerous marriages do nothing to dispel her cynicism.  No less culpable but much more idealistic, Stephen is taken by her for reasons we can and cannot understand.  Surely Martyn is reveling in the freedoms of youth that presumably eluded Stephen owing to his career and long marriage, and Stephen is sentimental for those times when his whole life lay before him, unread, undetermined, but very promising.  The less transparent reason is his own, something that he makes light of at the end of the film, and has to do with Anna as the person he was always meant to covet, to have, and perhaps to keep.  The two of them conspire on an affair that only gets more heated once Martyn and Anna announce their engagement.

Reviews of the film tend to sprinkle their compliments on the fine acting (Irons and Richardson in particular are more than perfect, they are unforgettable), beautiful decor, and straight road of destiny that each of the characters follows.  Yet among these same reviews, one finds numerous concerns about the plausibility of the whole endeavor.  Anna is not the type of woman that drives a man to passion or obsession say a few critics, apparently experts on both subjects;  there are, others point out, additional character issues apart from the extramarital affair that remain unexplored (a valid observation were it not for the fact that the movie is about monomania and the extinction of everything else); then there are the numerous sex scenes which critics tell us, with no small disappointment, are simply not sexy; finally, since this is a film about passion, an emotion to which Stephen is famously accused of being immune, the alleged sparks between the two main characters are, they are sorry to say, decidedly cold and, well, passionless.  All in all an attractive picture if a fairy tale. 

How curious it is that the same reviewers who suspend their disbelief for giant extraterrestrials, ghosts, talking animals, vampires, werewolves, and sharp-witted, benevolent teenagers find the circumstances in Damage, as well as the particular casting, unlikely.  True enough, there are certain assumptions made of artistic melodramas that confine them to the realm of the real and preclude supernatural or otherworldly intervention.  Yet how can we judge what is, in essence, a fairy tale with modern princes and princesses living in the upper echelon of early 1990s London?  This is hardly a realistic slice of life for the majority of viewers.  Why should their tastes and emotions (and the strange way in which they express these emotions) be any more familiar to us than their lifestyles?  They are not.  Nothing seems real because the whole film is a wild dream that sees its end in its beginning and rambles forth undeterred hoping that it will survive.  It is Stephen’s second youth and his death, although we pity him more than anyone else in the film.  He is lost, utterly lost, utterly without a center or a pole or gravity itself.  He cannot crash down to earth, and because he cannot let go of one woman who doesn't seem so different from anyone else, he is exiled to hover forever in space and watch his innermost desires from afar.  And, unlike Anna, he does not know whether he can survive.