Tantric voyage of discovery or soft-focus skin flick? Leo Owen decides...

Art-house Argentinian film, Don't Look Down picked up awards at the Montreal World Festival and Guadalajara Mexican Film Festival. While it's verging on soft porn and full of self-indulgent lingering shots, some beautiful cinematography and quotable lines, make it a worthy watch.

Our protagonist, Eloy, claims “Nothing interesting ever happened to me before I met Elvira” which is certainly true of his genitalia. Prior to Elvira, his father's death triggered sleepwalking so his brother built a “ghost catcher” to try to wake him up. Instead, his nightly stroll takes a different route and one fateful night he falls into a neighbour's skylight landing on her bed.

A set and clothes designer, living in Barcelona, Elvira is on holiday, staying with her spiritual grandmother, Celia – a potion-maker and aura reader. Well-travelled and worldly, Elvira sets about teaching Eloy the four main sexual positions and 26 variations, much to his unsurprising delight.

Visually spectacular, Don't Look Down, is full of eccentric characters and utilises the haunting beauty of Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires. On first introduction Eloy looks like a stilted cross between a Victorian undertaker and a clown. He has the world's highest stilts, his “neighbourhood borders on the underworld” and he can see dead people. After kissing Elvira, he believes she's a witch and her saliva has hallucinogenic properties, allowing him to see her aura. A foggy scene where he falls asleep hugging a tree and a stilted date with Elvira both possess a strange beauty.

"Everything about Don't Look Down is so drenched in sex, that even innocent requests appear suggestive: “I need a nut for this screw”"

As their relationship grows so does Eloy's sexual stamina as he progresses from 40 to 60 “thrusts” and then between 80-100 – at which point he starts to mentally travel to other cities and countries. Everything about Don't Look Down is so drenched in sex, that even innocent requests appear suggestive: “I need a nut for this screw”.

While Eloy and Elvira progress through a whole array of bizarrely named positions (“Goat facing a tree”, “Swan in late spring”...), a dialogue akin to Lady Chatterly's Lover but slightly more graphic accompanies their lessons. As teacher, Elvira spouts most of these cringe-inducing lines: “I can teach you to walk in paradise with any woman... lost seed is lost energy. In the body, there's a hidden pearl – your job is to find it. The golden valley awaits - suck my three buttons with all your love.” Eloy is much more direct in his approach: “So, we came to talk about electricity – I thought we came to fuck?”

Amid all the sex talk, there are some genuinely funny and inspired lines, such as “I was dying of love for Elvira – the only dead guy in the neighbourhood who smelt of sex” and Eloy's realisation that “Death smelt like flowers, life smelt like shit.” The concept of harnessing the power of an orgasm for travel is comic genius as is Eloy's idea for his own epitaph: “He who best conserved his cum, alas has succumbed.”

"Don't Look Down feels like an adaptation of a Joy Of Sex style manual with a plot awkwardly fitted around it"

Don't Look Down feels like an adaptation of a Joy Of Sex style manual with a plot awkwardly fitted around it. Although there are far too many long drawn-out scenes depicting Eloy and Elvira gazing at each other's flesh or eyes amid frequent arty coming shots, Don't Look Down works as a coming-of-age story. Whether its instructional quality benefits you, it's certainly worth remembering Director, Eliseo Subiela's final message: “In life you will always be saying goodbye – don't let that stop you from loving.”.

Special Features:

● Stills Gallery
● Trailer
● Interview with the Director, Eliseo Subiela

The stills gallery is limited but the interview Eliseo gives confirms all suspicions that the film is based upon a manual, “The Tao of Love and Sex” - a book he read some ten or fifteen years ago. He describes his actors as “two young people playing the Garden Of Eden before the fall” and admits to ascribing the female with the role of sex tutor. What is most interesting about his views is him describing the film as the direct opposite of a porn film and saying his desired audience should be 13 or 14, claiming he'd have benefitted in life, if he'd have watched the film at that age.

Director/writer: Eliseo Subiela
Release Date: 26 July 2010
Running Time: 84 mins
Starring: Leandro Stivelman, Antonella Costa, Hugo Arana, Monica Galan, Octavio Borro, Maria Elena Ruas, Marzenka Novak, Viviana Piccolo

Don't Look Down is out now.

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