THE RIGHT STEPS TO ROMANCE\Film directors discover what choreographers always have known\about dancing, seduction.

Byline: Nancy Goldner The New York Times

Dancing sways the soul before the brain can get a word in. It is the perfect language of seduction.

Choreographers have always known this, but film directors are increasingly discovering dancing - social dancing - as a sure way to steer couples into the bedroom. Stirring and exposing feelings so quickly, dancing pre-empts the brain's job of weighing the evidence and making judgments.

If they had second thoughts, the gun-toting police detective and the Amish woman in "Witness" would never dare to fall in love; nor would the married woman and the roving photographer in "The Bridges of Madison County."

But dancing precludes second thoughts for these couples, as it does for the about-to-be-divorced twosome in "Something to Talk About."

In these and several other recent films, including the new "White Squall," dancing is not choreographed by the likes of an Astaire. Rather, it is arranged by the director as a means to an end.

With the exception of "Something to Talk About," none of the recent films make dancing paramount; camera work can transmit a romantic message as forcefully as the dancers' steps, and the steps themselves are rudimentary. You and I could do them, with perhaps just a lesson or two at Arthur Murray under our belts.

In "The American President," the widowed president and the lobbyist he might woo clinch their love pact while waltzing around the White House dining room during a state dinner, but the camera whirls even faster than they do.

It's the camera's dancing that creates the heady feeling of romance, and it's the camera's close scrutiny of the couple's faces that creates the slightly dangerous sensation of romance unfolding in a fishbowl.

The dancing couple in "The Bridges of Madison County" simply sway, while in "Waiting to Exhale" the bodies of the woman looking for love and of the man who won't give it are absolutely static except for their hands.

In this nondance dance scene in a cocktail lounge, all we see are her hands slipping around his neck and his hands pressing into her lower back. Although it's hard to find a justification for this extreme camera angle, the scene does define what dancing is in the movies: It is people touching with music and without speech.

Speechlessness is, of course, normal in concert dance, but in the movies it is out of the ordinary and thus a powerful ally of seduction.

In "The Bridges of Madison County," Robert Kincaid and Francesca (Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep) at first exchange intimacies by exchanging stories about their past.

Robert protests the effort to reveal himself with words. They do much better at the intimacy game by swaying together in a tight hug alongside the kitchen table while Johnny Hartman croons on the radio.

There is no talk; there are just their heads buried in each other's neck and the camera hugging them as they hug each other. Out of these images comes the summation of the movie's theme: about a love so hermetic that it can survive death. When this love is unearthed by Francesca's children, it is like a perfectly preserved archeological artifact that transforms their lives.

The dance scene in "Something to Talk About," a movie released last fall, is as raucous as the one in "Bridges" is hushed. Eddie (Dennis Quaid), the two-timing anti-hero, wants to reconcile with his wife, Grace (Julia Roberts).

He's about to go into a long explanation about how the lunch with his divorce lawyer was all a mistake, then he chucks the narration. "Come on, baby, let's dance," he bellows at Grace and, dragging her by the arm onto the clubhouse dance floor, seduces her into a reconciliation by dancing her down memory lane.

At first, Grace resists twirling under his arm and is embarrassed by his loose, goofy moves. But she can't resist the power of "muscle memory." She twirls. Then he leads her farther back in time, to the happy days when they practiced dance routines in the den. One-two-three-kick, right knee up, left knee up.

Whether she likes it or not, here is Grace moving in instinctive harmony with the man she loathes.

"White Squall" is about the tragic sea voyage of a brigantine in which six people drown in a storm. Having lost his wife in the squall, the skipper Christopher Sheldon (Jeff Bridges) stands to lose his professional credentials as well during a tribunal that takes place following the disaster.

He is saved by his surviving crew, all of them teen-age boys, who grew to love him during the voyage and now testify in his behalf.

For this turn of events to be credible, the audience must love Sheldon, too, which is no easy task. Sheldon is one of those tough old salts who teaches his young crew by humiliating them and, in one case, endangering a boy's life.

The film's director, Ridley Scott, shows the audience Sheldon's soft side by having him waltz with his wife at a marina restaurant in the Caribbean. "Sometimes you act halfway normal," his wife says as they twirl around. He grins and agrees, and so does the charmed audience.

The dancing in "The Postman" ("Il Postino") is not a turning point, but it does introduce a central theme of the movie. The local postman (Massimo Troisi), in one of his first visits to the Italian home-in-exile of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (Philippe Noiret) and his wife, watches the couple do a brief dance, also a tango.

On first sight, one notices the disparity between their sophistication and the postman's backwardness. But once you zero in on how they move, the dancing looks forced and contrived, whereas everything else Neruda does is blessed with unstudied grace.

Compare the lovely, familiar way Neruda peels an onion with the way he dances, as stiffly as a self-styled matador. His wife, likewise, tilts her head upward and raises her shoulders with mannered hauteur.

The camera work, too, is contrived. The couple are too perfectly framed within the archway of a door. Then they glide through the door onto a balcony in imitation of Fred and Ginger movies. The fancy camera work looks ostentatious.

The postman is embarrassed watching them, and you have to wonder whether the show that Neruda and his wife are staging is meant to embarrass him, exclude him from their marital happiness or titillate him. The unpleasantness of this scene, unique in the movie, plants the seed of suspense that helps sustain the movie.

What all these movies share in common is a surprise bordering on paradox. While the actual dancing is short-lived and bare-boned, each fragment is crucial to the film's dramatic development. One move, whether by the actors or the camera, is worth a thousand words.

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Photo In "The American President," widowed president Michael Douglas and lobbyist Annette Bening clinch their love pact while waltzing around the White House dining room during a state dinner.