Stiff Upper Libido

By RICHARD CORLISS

TITLE: DAMAGE

DIRECTOR: LOUIS MALLE

WRITER: DAVID HARE

TITLE: PETER'S FRIENDS

DIRECTOR: KENNETH BRANAGH

WRITERS: RITA RUDNER, MARTIN BERGMAN

THE BOTTOM LINE: How to cope with postimperial passion and pessimism? Two British films provide answers.

ONE THING THE BRITISH RULING classes learned in their centuries of imperial domain was how to suffer at the hands of lower orders they could not control. They got the starch in that stiff upper lip from pretending not to be shocked or exasperated at the outrages of unruly colonials to whom they played nanny. Now, with the empire in eclipse, Britons have turned inward to the late 20th century task of controlling themselves and found that the new ordeal is no less vexing than the old. Their hearts may explode through their Savile Row vests, but it's stiff upper libido all round.

Damage was directed by Frenchman Louis Malle (in whose country the film is waggishly tagged Dommage); Peter's Friends was co-written by U.S. comic princess Rita Rudner. But these films are British to the bone. They take the dry approach to very wet issues: mad passion in Damage, nearly every other brand of designer angst in Peter's Friends.

Six Cambridge pals meet a decade later at the country estate of one of their number, Peter (Stephen Fry). Bright promise has faded; rancor reigns. Life is a melancholy progression: "Kindergarten. School. University. Black hole." In its bantering way, the movie is ambitious to a fault. When it isn't addressing the lapsing of marital love or the exhausting of extramarital lust, it's got dead babies on its mind, and AIDS, and the plight of friends who would be the lovers of friends who'd just as soon not.

Sounds promising, but Peter's Friends is awful, with glimpses of wit. The script is hopelessly schematic: one long, drawing-room chat in which people dish each other, then leave the room so they can be talked about. Kenneth Branagh's direction shows none of the care he lavished on his Henry V and little of the rowdy dazzle of Dead Again. He also misuses some wonderful actors, including his wife, Emma Thompson; she must put her radiance on hold to play a prematurely old maid who wants Peter to "fill me with your babies." Though the plot is a rehash of The Big Chill, you may ultimately begin wishing Peter's Friends were instead a remake of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians. Which one of these egregious twits, you ask hopefully, will be the first to be killed?

Death is in the air from the first moments of Damage. A middle-age Member of Parliament (Jeremy Irons), comfortable in marriage to a rich, charming woman (Miranda Richardson) meets the enigmatic girlfriend (Juliette Binoche) of his son (Rupert Graves) and falls in love -- really falls, headfirst, from the precipice of his propriety. People don't survive this impact. They either die or are scarred forever by guilt and loss.

Josephine Hart wrote her best seller in a style that deserves to be called high Harlequin. Irons and Binoche get into this spirit with their scenes of sexual gymnastics, some of which stretch the laws of physics. But playwright David Hare (Plenty) is more interested in the contortions decent people put themselves through to follow their obsessions while maintaining decorum. Irons has wonderful command of that flummoxed look that seizes the spirit of powerful men who can't understand how they lost control of their life. And Binoche has the lure of mystery in her fine features; she is every faraway land the British ever hoped, against hope, to conquer.