Painful viewing: Madonna and Willem Dafoe in Body of Evidence. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext Collection
I clearly remember my first. Helen Mirren and John Lynch in Cal. I was a pale and innocent young 'un and Mirren's naked form was the most beautiful, terrifying thing I had ever seen. The scene itself was awkward, tender, intense. It set the bar unreasonably high - my painstaking and selfless research would reveal that most movie sex sucked, and not in the good way. By way of honouring this truth, Maxim has announced the Worst Love Scene of all Time. The magazine, which certainly knows something about the exploitative use of sex, identifies the scene between Rosie O'Donnell and Julian McMahon in Nip/Tuck as the nadir of screen nookie. While it's true that the idea of that particular coupling doesn't send the pulses racing, there are plenty of love scenes between perfectly handsome actors and pretty actresses that have bombed due to flatlining chemistry or duff direction.
A fine example would be the swimming pool scene between Elizabeth Berkley with Kyle MacLachlan in Showgirls - a set-piece that embodied the kind of glass-eyed porn stylings Ron Jeremy would dismiss as tasteless. While Showgirls was every kind of bad, it lacked the world class pretension of Body of Evidence. Madonna and Willem Dafoe had the kind of client-lawyer relationship guaranteed to raise all kinds of thorny ethical issues. When he wasn't handcuffing her, she was pouring candlewax on his knackers and it was exactly as sexy as that sounds. It was intended as a shocking glimpse into masochistic love but, as is often the case with such films, the only genuine masochism involved was in the viewing of it.
Louis Malle created a landmark in cinema sex when The Lovers provoked a legal redefinition of obscenity in the United States - but even he couldn't provoke convincing performances out of Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche in Damage. Irons is cadaverous in the frigid love scenes, Binoche unresponsive and a palpable sense that they didn't care much for each other was confirmed in post release interviews.
So which love scenes left you cold or even rolling in the aisles with their po-faced grunting? It shouldn't be hard to come up with candidates - your difficulty may be in paring it down to a top 10. Particularly if you've followed Sharon Stone's career.
