Movie Love Scenes With Passion

Roger Ebert discusses movie love scenes that are passionate but not erotic with a nod to one of my favorite romantic movies, Out of Africa:

When Sydney Pollack was making 'Out of Africa' in 1985, he considered the problem of how to film Meryl Streep and Robert Redford in love scenes that were not explicit, yet were erotic. 'When I have Streep and Redford together,' he told me, 'I don't want to see them strip naked and writhe around in bed together. The challenge was to find love scenes that would have emotion and passion and yet not violate a certain place where we want to see them. There are two really sensual love scenes. One of them is the undressing scene. I always like scenes like that. I think they're sexy. I tried to make a sort of passionate dance out of them undressing each other. The second scene consists of three absolutely terrific lines I took out of a screenplay that was written in 1973 when Nicholas Roeg was going to direct this project. It's only three lines, but what lines: 'Don't move. I want to move. Don't move.'

His instincts were correct. We don't want to see Streep and Redford in a conventional sex scene. That would break the film's romantic spell, and reduce it to sexual choreography. In most movie sex scenes, the director chooses lighting, camera placement, music, and the tempo at which he decides intercourse should take place. The actors perform not as they might in life, but as they think their characters would. I have never seen a 'sex scene' that was particularly erotic. The center of feeling is primarily, by necessity, off screen.

Hey, I'm no prude but, well, all right, I'm a prude, but I do think a director faces a greater challenge staging a love scene that will come across as passionate without being overtly sexual. I mean, come on, we all know what's going on, don't we? Let's leave something to our imaginations.

Ebert lists more examples but I'm glad he led off with this one.