It's not a sex scene, per se: more a series of post-coital cuddles, but so intimately shot as to feel utterly convincing. This remake of Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder is, incidentally, a vastly underrated thriller, with great work from all three leads (Michael Douglas is the mad-as-hell husband), also and especially from David Suchet as the investigating detective. In fact, if you can watch it with the alternate ending intact, it qualifies as a great film. In the theatrical version, it still ranks among the very good.
NUMBER SEVEN: Ashley Judd and Viggo Mortensen in the Passion of Darkly Noon
This is a hard one to find. Philip Ridley is one of those cinematic enigmas. He made an underground (deep, deep underground) splash with the Reflecting Skin in 1990, a movie as strange and dark and compelling as you would imagine once you know it begins with an exploding toad. He followed it five years later with Passion, in which a young man (Brendan Fraser) raised in repressive religious surroundings escapes from a murderous mob and takes refuge with the free-spirited Judd and her mute boyfriend (Mortensen). It's no less strange than Skin (someone could probably write a thesis on that floating shoe) but has a fuller sense of depth and wholeness. Early on, the extraordinarily sensuous pairing of Judd and Mortensen enjoys an extraordinarily sensuous night of bliss which easily makes the list.
NUMBER SIX: Jude Law and Rachel Weisz in Enemy at the Gates
It's the worst part of the siege of Stalingrad. Law is a sniper who has become a hero of the Soviet struggle against the Nazis. Weisz is a Jewish intellectual who has thrown her lot in with the snipers. They sleep huddled in their uniforms along stone hallways in the rubble that was once a great city. Madly in love but with no opportunity for privacy, the two make love half-clad, almost silent, and surrounded by their comrades.
NUMBER FIVE: Clooney and Lopez in Out of Sight
It can't be an accident that two of these seven movies listed were edited by Anne V Coates. Her use of lightning-cuts to move smoothly back and forth in time gives the encounter a more engaging shape and allows us intimately into the heads of the characters. Again, this isn't the full-monty-last-tango-in-paris kind of sex scene, kind of wrapping up just when they get horizontal, but it's fantastically sexy. The movie itself, which was correctly lauded as a small masterpiece of action cinema (and probably led directly to those Soderbergh/Clooney Oceans yawners) is at heart a love story, and a marvellously well-realized one.
NUMBER FOUR: Kerry Fox and Mark Rylance in Intimacy
This is not just one sex scene but several, each communicating a different set of dynamics, often without spoken explanation. It's an electrifying accomplishment for two actors, requiring what must have been a near-total lack of vanity and some awesome, uberhuman discipline of concentration.
NUMBER THREE: Diana Glenn and Alex O'Loughlin in the Oyster Farmer
The scene on the dock. You'll know it. It's got great camera-work.
NUMBER TWO: Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello in a History of Violence
The one on the staircase, not the one in the bed.
Cronenberg gives us an interesting contrast here. The movie follows the journey of a happy, apparently well-adjusted family from denial of their own darkness into a forced exploration of their joint personal shadow. The first sex scene, performed in their daughter's bedroom with Bello dressed in her old cheerleaders' outfit, is saccharinely embarrassing. Only later, once the trickster darkness has invaded their home in the shape of the husband's past, do they find a truer expression of passion.
AND THE BEST SEX SCENE EVER:
Diane Lane and Olivier Martinez in Unfaithful
There's not a boring one in it, but the best is the first, in which Lane's character thinks back on her encounter with her lover as she rides home on the train. Largely due to her near-perfect performance (she ought to have had her Oscar; it was stolen from her by a beautiful woman wearing a fake nose), and largely to some of the most stunning editing I've ever seen (again, by Anne V Coates), watching this in the cinema felt more like actually having sex than watching a movie. Even on DVD, the immediacy of the flesh is so tangible as to be nearly unbearable. Aside from all that, the whole film is breathtaking, a real stunner from that problematical Eminence Terrible Adrian Lyne.
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