The Last Seduction is an underrated 90s classic. This 1994 neo-noir directed by John Dahl feels like an erotic thriller, but it's so much more than that. It's a film with some seriously interesting character choices and a skintastic performance by leading actress Linda Fiorentino! Let's give it the spotlight that it deserves.
Linda plays Bridget Gregory, a woman who works as a manager in a corporate job in New York City. She's tough and sexy as she busts the balls of all of her employees. It's dominant and hot. Her husband is in med school and heavily in debt. He arranges to sell stolen drugs in order to pay off his loan sharks. When he gets home from a tense altercation, he takes it out on his wife before taking a shower. When he is in the shower, she takes the cash and runs.
She goes on the run and stops in a small town outside of Buffalo...so she didn't get TOO far from New York City. Anyway, she meets a local man from there who is back in town after his marriage fell apart. He tries to pick up Linda's character, but she puts him in his place. She wants to sleep with him while she is in town and that's IT.
She tells him her name is Wendy and the two hook up after she pins him against a chain-link fence and tells him: "You're my designated fuck." The chain-link-fence sex scene? Allegedly, that was all Linda's idea. She took charge - just like her character.
As Karina Longworth stated in You Must Remember This, The Last Seduction is a noir that puts all of the sexual innuendoes out in the open. Fiorentino's femme fatale speaks the unspoken and it's both jarring and sexy. It's what makes her character sooooo alluring.
That makes sense when you consider Linda Fiorentino has the noir charm of Lana Turner, Lauren Bachal, and Barbara Stanwyck all rolled into one. Even her hair is in the style of Veronica Lake, but brunette which indicates she's not some innocent blonde. She's always been touch - ever since her debut in Vision Quest. From that to her role after this in Jade, Linda Fiorentino has always been a dominant dame.
He falls for her, but she tries to manipulate him. They come up with a crime con to help cheated wives get revenge on their husbands by killing them. Meanwhile, her husband hires a private detective to get the money back from his wife.
Things get CRAZY from here with more manipulation and violence from the villainous anti-hero Linda Fiorentino. There are all kinds of running around and lying. In the end, Linda sets up the men and gets rid of them as cleanly as possible (by lying, manipulating, and scheming!) and then she runs off with the money. She looks good doing it, too.
Steve Barancik said that the film he wrote was originally pitched as a "standard Skinemax" flick meaning that it was low-budget and sexy. Despite that pitch, the filmmakers always intended to make a good film.
Fiorentino herself said that she loved the character so much when she read the script that she told director John Dahl, "John, you are not allowed to hire anyone but me for this film." She was not joking about that! Good thing he listened to her.
The film had a complicated release. It was meant to be an awards contender with a premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, but the rights were sold to HBO and HBO premiered it on their channel before the festival season began. This meant that it was ineligible for the Oscars and that became part of its marketing strategy.
I think that Linda Fiorentino is so sexually dominant in this film - and that she does questionable things and comes up on top - is enough to garner interest. It still garners my interest! She is a very complicated character...and she makes being bad look so good.
