Don't Look Down

By: Amos Lassen

Strand Releasing's "Don't Look Down" explores sexual awakenings and imaginations as well as mysticism and spirituality. Eloy is nineteen and one night while sleepwalking, he falls through the roof of a beautiful woman, Elvira. She is an expert on the Kama Sutra and she shares her knowledge with Eloy.

Eliseo Subiela, the Argentine director, brings us a film that is charged with eroticism. This is a magical coming-of-age film that looks at sexual knowledge and how it relates to the mysteries of life and how it balances the spirit. Elvira is sex personified but she is also a respected woman and she is the wise one sexually.

The movie is a compilation from the tantric tradition, the Kama Sutra which is a manual for different sexual positions. The word "tantra" is Sanskrit and it means to explore, to spread and to manifest. In other words sex is a combination of different energies-thoughts, actions and physical matter. In tantric sex, lovemaking is prolonged so that the sexual union is perfect and harmonious. The sexual act changes from an act of doing to an act of being and becomes a spiritual as well as a physical experience.

"Don't Look Down" is an attempt at translating tantric sex into terms that can be related by a movie. Eloy at 19 is something of a mystic as he feels the spirit of his recently dead father passing through him and also sees the dead residents at the cemetery near his home. He has a simple job-he walks the streets of Buenos Aires on stilts selling sandwiches. After his meeting with Elvira, he learns of her expertise of tantric sex and he begins to spend afternoons with her. He is made aware of the meeting of sexuality and mysticism and how to have sex without ejaculation. He discovers that he can travel out of his body and end up where he wants to.

We learn that Elvira is only visiting Buenos Aires and when she tells Eloy that she must leave to return to Barcelona, he finds it difficult to let her go. The two that have come together must now come apart but Eloy is the wiser.

I am not sure what constitutes eroticism as I found the movie to be very erotic and another reviewer said he found no eroticism and in fact he found the movie uninteresting. That is the beauty of good cinema-we are allowed to come to our own judgments.