No mires para abajo

This is one of those films which you will watch either because of the sex scenes it contains or because you want a good Spanish speaking film with readable English sub-titles - or both. What you get in fact is an underrated emotional comedy which has all the sex you might want to watch for curiosity sake while using it as a lesson to brush up on your Spanish.

My wife and I were very taken with the film, it was nice to watch together. Yes it is a sort of Kama Sutra movie, but the film is artistically directed and the storyline, although not reaching Hollywood heights, will tickle and tease you with delight, and I am not talking about the sex scenes in that reference.

Here is a film carrying a double meaning, a young boy who has been taught by his Father to walk on stilts, so he looks down on people in an amusing way. Not only that, as a sleepwalker, he has an uncanny ability to see the dead 'alive' each morning, this is all very touching in a young man who is setting out on a life of sexual exploration.

I found this film on DVD by accident. I am always glad to watch a foreign language movie and especially one in Spanish. An Argentinian movie is a rare treat. Something as sexually evocative and artistic as this IS a rare treat indeed. There is hardly any nudity in movies of current release nowadays and when there is, it is hardly done in an artistic way.

There are some great expressions and some really funny moments. The story is somewhat thin at times but that matters not to the overall enjoyment of the movie.

Here we have a movie with artistic credibility, no bad language, no violence, a movie which is just a pleasure to watch.

I've watched this movie by the advice of my friend who's liked very much and find it successfully. After watching movie, I have also loved this film. It is the one of the best erotic movies which I have ever seen. İnitially, this movie is instructive. It is described various sex positions, the ways of extension of sexual intercourse and so on. In the other side, it is not contain only erotic scenes. There are magic realist scenes, dreams, imagination, longing of father, amusing scenes and so on. Director Eliseo Subielo is one of the my best directors, his other movies are good particularly "El lade oscuro del corazon" which picturegoers must watch.

This movie was very interesting. The love of the father for his son, the love of the son for his father. The music in the movie is very good. I love the scene where the nana dances as the same time as Elvira dances for Eloy. A beautiful movie. Even tough it is suppose to have been made from a tao manual, I feel it turned out to be very philosophical. I enjoyed it immensely. It was erotic and I am sure it depicts a lot of the journey for tantric student. The actors are beautiful. The decor are enchanting. The music is appropriate. The dead father finally "living" his life is a glimor of hope for the afterlife. The best line ever: In life you will always be saying goodbye – don't let that stop you from loving.".

The story is just really weird. This movie tries to be super artsy on all fronts but that's really all there is to it. Thus, the end project feels like a very exotic art school project.

If you are looing for romance in a movie, this one sorely disappoints. It's hard to think romance when the scene flips to dead men sitting in a cemetary. This kind of flip from romance to death related scenes basically describes the whole movie, quite the let down.

If you want to watch it for the adult nature, there's far better adult movies around the same intimate theme.

The storyline is completely polluted with death. The leads talk about it constantly, there's dead men chilling in the cemetary between each scene, there's headstone engraving, a father dying after burning love letters from an affair he had, and more talking about death. It's overkill, even for a school art project. The filmmakers use this theme to try to be artsy and risqué but without an actual story that makes sense, it's just a collection of weirdness as it combines with the sex scenes.

In short, this movie:

• fails as a romantic movie
• fails as an erotic movie
• fails as an artsy movie
• fails as a fantasy movie

It's a erotic cemetary fantasy gone wrong; it's just weird on every level.

Eliseo Subiela has that rare quality of seeing magic in reality, of portraying it in his movies with freshness and philosophical depth. His characters, despite being normal, are in a special kind of reality, and their interaction with our world is always eccentric and quirky. Subiela is true to himself in the premise of the movie, as it departs from a quote from a poem by Andre Breton that intrinsically links live, love and death and considers physical love as a redemptive element in life.

The movie revolves about the sexual awakening of Eloy, a sweet and absent-minded teenager, apprentice of electrician and courier boy to the nearby cemetery, who starts sleepwalking after the death of his father and ends in the arms of a sassy and older neighbor, Elvira, who will teach him how to satisfy a woman and himself.

If you want to make a movie about tantric sex and sexual initiation you need two basic elements. Firstly, a couple of sensual actors who have chemistry on camera and are able to transmit eroticism to the spectator, so that we can believe that they are having sex and enjoying it. Secondly, to create the right atmosphere and mood so the sex scenes look natural and passionate. All of that was missing from the movie, despite sex being the main subject of the movie. The scenes look unnatural, forced, like a rehearsal. They are shot with constriction, without passion and with some visual bigotry, despite the intention of the movie being quite the opposite. It felt like those modern Kamasutra books with photos of nude couples posing in the different sexual positions - Boring and not erotic. It would have been better, perhaps, showing less, and leaving more to the imagination, which always gives great results.

The most memorable moments of the movie are, however, those few in which the movie distracts itself from sex and portrays reality in Eloy's eyes and part of the family's story. The happy eeriness of Eloy's trips to the cemetery on his bike to deliver tablets are wonderfully photographed and shot, the natural interaction between the deceased and those alive are those more closely connected to Breton's initial poem and Subiela's style. Here we see the always charming Subiela in action, focusing on what he does best.

Regarding the acting, I found Leandro Stivelman good and believable in his portray of the sweet and dreamy Eloy, and also Hugo Arana in his short role as Eloy's deceased father. I did not find Antonella Costa believable at all in her portray of Elvira, neither in the sex scenes or in the talking ones. Perhaps because the script does not give much information about her, and the one that gives does not help the viewer to understand her. On the other hand, she does not have the sensuality or acting maturity necessaries to affront a role like this. The rest of the actors are OK in their respective roles.

Glimpses of the best Subiela are wasted by a rather mediocre and un-erotic movie with a very weak script