The screen’s most seductive scenes

What do you think is/are the most seductive scenes you’ve ever seen in a movie (local and/or foreign)?

Off-hand, I can think of three:

• From Insiang (directed by Lino Brocka) – Hilda Koronel ironing clothes at their shack in a slum area, throwing seductive glances at Ruel Vernal, lover of Hilda’s mother (Mona Lisa), in an attempt to draw Ruel’s attention and affection away from Mona. Later, Hilda and Ruel end up in bed, not for love but to put a wedge between her mom and the lover.

• From Scorpio Nights (by Peque Gallaga) – Daniel Fernando peeping through a hole on the second floor of a cramped apartment building, watching his lover (Anna Marie Gutierrez) making love with her cop-husband (Orestes Ojeda), with Anna Marie looking at Daniel over Orestes’ shoulder, as if to say, "Wanna join us?" Towards the end of the movie, Orestes catches Anna Marie and Daniel in the act and shoots them while locked in a passionate embrace.

• The third is from Larawan (Nick Joaquin’s Portrait of the Artist as Filipino in the vernacular), staged at the Fort Santiago in the late ’60s, directed by Lino Brocka – Dante Rivero (as Tony Javier) tries to seduce Lolita Rodriguez (as Paula, with the late Charito Solis as Candida) who resists by tentatively pushing Dante away from her, saying, "Huwag, huwag...," and finally losing her defenses, adding, "Huwag dito!"

In a recent issue, US magazine Movieline (sent to Funfare by my New York-based friend Raoul Tidalgo, entertainment editor and columnist of The Filipino Reporter) listed "The Screen’s 20 Most Seductive Scenes." Here are three of them:

1. Casablanca (1942) – Ingrid Bergman, arguably the ’40s’ most simultaneously-revered and lusted-after Good Girl superstar, is at her most ravishingly sexy as The Woman Who Got Away from embittered, emotionally-lacerated cafe owner Humphrey Bogart in the Oscar-winning World War II classic for wised-up romantics. Into Rick’s Cafe American floats the radiant, carnal Bergman, the wife of a noble Nazi resistance hero desperate for letters of transit that will let the couple escape from their pursuers. Cynical, flippant Rick (his motto: "I stick my neck out for nobody") finds his principles and passions tested when, after he has closed the club for the night, finds Bergman, his lost love, waiting for him in his apartment. Bergman begs Bogart for the letter of transit, then pulls a gun on him, then, with tears streaming, recalls their love affair. "The day you left Paris, if you knew what I went through... if you knew how much I loved you – how much I still love you." She’s got him. And how. They kiss to the swoony swell of Max Steiner’s theme music (As Time Goes By). Anyone who has ever loved and lost The One will feel the emotional tug.

2. Basic Instinct (1992) – Sharon Stone deserved the instant pop-icon status she achieved as the calculating, dangerous, alluring modern femme fatale with a penchant for ice picks in this murderously-sexy film noir. She moves, talks and dresses like a latter-day Hitchcock heroine – Grace Kelly hot-wired with Kim Novak – gone irretrievably over the edge. Although Stone looked a natural to take up where lethal glamour girls of the past had left off, she went for the higher ground of status and critical respectability. Here, though, she glows malevolently. No wonder Michael Douglas’ burnt-out, on-edge homicide detective loses his head to her the way worldwide audiences did. By now, it’s a cliche to cite Stone’s thigh-parting as the film’s lusty high point. But for audacious seduction, we vote for the disco rave sequence during which Douglas finds Stone in the men’s restroom where, in a stall, her female lover straddles her while they both snort coke. When he approaches as if to join in, she slams the stall door in his face. You want it? Suffer. It’s a sexed-up counterpoint to ice-queen Grace Kelly shutting her hotel-room door in buffled Cary Grant’s face in To Catch a Thief.

3. Out of Sight (1993) – Jennifer Lopez at her most earthy and polished and George Clooney at his most irresistible deliver the most memorably romantic foreplay scene in recent screen history. Riffing on the "opposites attract" theory – she’s a federal marshal, he’s her ex-con bank robber quarry – the stars play adversaries ineluctably drawn to one another. They spark one night in a rooftop Detroit hotel bar with a snowstorm raging beyond the wraparound windows; their fireworks are set off by tart, multi-layered, slightly rueful dialogue by both actors with the kind of insouciant self-assurance that makes audiences fall in love with them as the characters fall in love with each other. It helps, of course, that Lopez and Clooney are costumed, lit and shot to perfection throughout the movie, but what makes this particular scene zing is the buildup of erotic tension between them that mounts by intercutting their badinage (rife with double meanings) with shots of them undressing in a hotel suite – a homage, we understand, to the classic lovemaking montage in Don’t Look Now.