Seduced and Betrayed (1995)

It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.

The first must-see film of the year.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

For sheer camp, this TV movie is worth the while. If nothing else, it gives hope (however false) to the over-40 crowd that some young thing is available, even if he/she is 25 years younger.Certainly Susan Lucci is not an actress worthy of an Oscar nod. On the other hand, she has been around a lot longer than many actresses, and she still commands an audience. David Charvet is much too good-looking in his role to have wanted/needed a fling with Lucci. But this is the sort of movie that begs you not to ask any questions...just go along for the absurdly amusing ride.I knew I had seen Charvet somewhere, and it turned out he was a former "Baywatch Boy" from the 90s. Even if you don't care for Susan Lucci, this is still worth it for the over-the-top madness of it all.I still catch it when it's rerun, and age makes it even more surreal and likable.

The plot of this film might best be described as "The Graduate" meets "Fatal Attraction". The central character is Dan Hiller, a young man working as a builder, who meets, and has a brief affair with, Victoria, an attractive older woman. When his feelings of guilt (he is married with a young son) lead him to break off the affair, Victoria will not take no for an answer and pursues him, attempting to break up his marriage and ruin his career.In "The Graduate", Mrs Robinson was supposed to be about twenty years older than Benjamin, although in reality Anne Bancroft was only six years older than Dustin Hoffman. In "Seduced and Betrayed" we have the opposite situation. Susan Lucci, who plays Victoria, is actually twenty-six years older than Baywatch beefcake David Charvet, who plays Dan, although I suspect that the difference in the ages of the characters is supposed to be rather less. Charvet was only twenty-three when he made this film, considerably younger not only than Lucci but also than Gabrielle Carteris who plays Dan's wife Cheryl, and wears designer stubble throughout, presumably a desperate attempt to make him look slightly less boyish. I doubt if the scriptwriters really intended to imply that Dan had fathered a child while still a schoolboy and that Cheryl was guilty of the statutory rape of a minor.This carelessness about casting is only one of the problems with the film. After the success of "Fatal Attraction", there was a vogue in the late eighties and nineties for thrillers of this type, in which stranger who comes into the life of the hero or heroine initially seems pleasant and affable but later proves to be a mentally unstable or dangerously malevolent villain. "Fatal Attraction" itself is a reasonably good example of the genre, but "Seduced and Betrayed", which copies the same basic plot, is much weaker. Glenn Close gave an excellent performance in the earlier film, but Lucci is not in the same class as an actress. She has a reputation as the Queen as the TV movie- as far as I am aware she has never made a cinematic feature- but her performance here does nothing to counter the frequently-held belief that the TV movie is the last refuge of actors insufficiently talented or charismatic to make it in Hollywood.She is reasonably convincing as the seductive older woman, looking surprisingly glamorous for a woman only just short of her fiftieth birthday, but when in the second half of the film the script requires her to turn nasty it is evidently asking for emotions beyond her range. The storyline obviously indicates that Victoria reacts to Dan's rejection of her with rage and vindictiveness, but Lucci's demeanour indicates nothing more serious than mild disappointment. Hell hath no fury like a woman slightly miffed with her ex-boyfriend.Another reason for the weakness of the film is that Victoria is too obviously a villain. In "Fatal Attraction" we may not sympathise with the behaviour of Close's character Alex, but we can at least sympathise with her plight as a woman approaching middle age and desperate for love. Similarly, we can sympathise with the feelings of Rebecca de Mornay's character in "The Hand that Rocks the Cradle", a woman who has suffered much and is desperate for revenge. This sympathy gives those films an added depth and resonance, but Victoria is so obviously selfish and manipulative, using her wealth, beauty and influence to snare Dan, that no such sympathy is possible here.Carteris is not particularly convincing as Cheryl, and although the youthful Charvet copes surprisingly well with his role, there was nothing here to persuade me that this film was anything more than a routine TV potboiler. 4/10

I enjoyed the movie because my son Zach was the little boy in the movie. It was the only movie he ever appeared in. (He was actually cast in another movie, but his scene was cut.) He just graduated high school and will begin college in the fall. It is really nice that people talk about his one movie. By the way, on the set Susan Lucci, Gabrielle Carteris and David Charvet were all really nice to Zach and he enjoyed the experience. The movie was filmed in Phoenix, Arizona. Susan's husband Helmut was frequently on the set. In one scene where Zach was in the hospital, he is supposed to be sick. He wasn't acting. On that day, he really was sick. The film is sort of unbelievable, but it was great escapism.

I wondered if anyone else that saw this movie noticed the framed picture in the standing closet when Charvet's character accidentally bumped into it when the electric was out. I'm about 95% sure that was Susan Lucci's real life husband, Helmut Huber, and in reading the crews names, I noticed he co-produced this movie. Anyone else notice it? Apparently the framed picture was "Charlotte's" husband in the movie.I like both Susan Lucci and David Charvet as actors. I can see how the affair could actually happen in those circumstances, especially since Susan's character did several things to catch David off guard. But some of the movie was just too unrealistic, like the scene where Lucci shows up to dismiss the babysitter. The unrealism is why I voted the movie a 6.