Way Down is made by the Cazzo film company, who specialise in fairly extreme role play/rough gay porn films. Way Down is certainly rough - it includes some extreme scenes of anal sex, fisting, pissing, implements being inserted into the urethra - but it is also flamboyant, innovative, surrealistic and highly bizarre, so much so that it hardly qualifies as pornography at all - I don't find much of it arousing - but rather seems to be a highly experimental art house/dance film hybrid, as well as a futuristic vision of no small merit.
The plot concerns a bright-eyed and bushy tailed young blonde lad whose characterising feature seems to be extreme cleanliness. There is a compelling sequence near the beginning which shows him performing his ablutions in intimate detail, and which qualifies as one of the most thorough depictions of contemporary Western self-grooming I have seen, with its obsession with beauty products, skin treatments and spray deodorants. The boy lives in a high rise flat, and it doesn't take a genius to work out that he is (a) going to be going all the way down in a narrative sense, and (b) his squeaky clean image is going to be dirtied.
He gets a picture text inviting him to "come down" and so he leaves the safety of his flat to explore an underground realm of labyrinthine complexity and utmost depravity. The things he sees and, eventually, partakes in here are indescribably weird, as is the film's mis-en-scene. What seems to be going on is that he is encountering his fantasies, be they relatively normal or out there in the extreme. Soon, the sheer weirdness of the film's visuals and the strangeness of the implications of the sexual situations the performers are indulging in have made it clear that we are watching something more than you average porno. A real statement about human sexuality, chaos, desire, randomness and the drive to death is being laid out, in all its multifarious details, before our very eyes.
The film mostly takes place in a maze of stairwells, empty office suits, car park floors and corridors, all filmed with an expressionist brio which puts most mainstream science fiction product to shame. This seems to be a future world, one in which huge spaces exist where people can visit to indulge their most secret fantasies. It's certainly like no cruising area or club I have ever encountered, although it does refract in exaggerated shapes real illicit places of play. The most striking sequence has a contemporary dance troupe, made up of half a dozen gorgeous androgynous men, performing an obscene routine for a group of shady businessmen (and one businesswoman) who sit in a vast abandoned room on deckchairs, sipping drug-laced cocktails, voyeuristically enjoying the dancers gyrate themselves down on enormous dildos before collapsing into stupors and getting fleeced by the prancing band. There's a scene in a toilet, where a punky hunk in Marlborough logo motorbike gear picks up a nerdy office worker, takes him to an abandoned surveillance room and sexually humiliates him, sending old TVs crashing to the floor. Consumerism, advertising, fantasy and degradation cum together in a scene which even Ken Russell at his Tommy-level extremities would baulk at. In between such encounters, there is an obscure sub-plot involving a group of outcast cannibals (somewhat reminiscent of the tribe at the close of Godard's Weekend) who appear to have made their lair in the depths of the labyrinth.
Eventually, and it's a long and twisted journey, the squeaky clean blond boy ends up being sexually used and abused by a bunch of degenerates, who dress like they've been paying too much attention to the wilder reaches of the cinematic oeuvre of Mel Gibson, Mad Max or even Apocalypto.
The film is an extraordinary achievement. It shows where the urban West might be going, and it is deeply ambiguous about our descent. It could well be that spaces like this labyrinth becomes real and present, as we entomb ourselves in our fantasy lives and let our world fall to bits around us. It is a brave film, in that it both enacts the deepest, darkest fantasies of the gay subculture and also confirms the deepest fears held about that subculture by mainstream straight society. It is notable that most of the sex is bareback, which brings out the possibility that what you are watching is not merely an artistic depiction of a dance of death but real people actually flirting with it.
Way Down brings together a lot of different influences - from Fellini and Jarman through Tony Kaye ads to performance groups like DV8 (occasionally the action is punctuated by jagged dance encounters between random strangers) and Archaos - yet offers something the like of which I have never quite encountered before. I never even dreamed something like this movie could have existed. I think that whoever Ebo Hill is, he deserves to be given some credit for possessing a singular vision and using both the porn and narrative cinema in ways I have never seen either used before. The thing is, for all it's excess and oddness, the film makes a great deal of sense as a way of seeing a certain subset of the contemporary Western mind. There's a part of us which doesn't want order and productivity but rather absolute hedonism, random intensity, degradation and Thanatos. Way Down is a film which Foucault might have relished, had he lived to see it. The fact that he didn't live to see it is down to his actually having, to a great extent, lived it. It is a daringly philosophical film, an encounter with some of the most puzzling, risky and totally unacceptable thinking in our age. And thinking, of course, leads to doing.
The plot concerns a bright-eyed and bushy tailed young blonde lad whose characterising feature seems to be extreme cleanliness. There is a compelling sequence near the beginning which shows him performing his ablutions in intimate detail, and which qualifies as one of the most thorough depictions of contemporary Western self-grooming I have seen, with its obsession with beauty products, skin treatments and spray deodorants. The boy lives in a high rise flat, and it doesn't take a genius to work out that he is (a) going to be going all the way down in a narrative sense, and (b) his squeaky clean image is going to be dirtied.
He gets a picture text inviting him to "come down" and so he leaves the safety of his flat to explore an underground realm of labyrinthine complexity and utmost depravity. The things he sees and, eventually, partakes in here are indescribably weird, as is the film's mis-en-scene. What seems to be going on is that he is encountering his fantasies, be they relatively normal or out there in the extreme. Soon, the sheer weirdness of the film's visuals and the strangeness of the implications of the sexual situations the performers are indulging in have made it clear that we are watching something more than you average porno. A real statement about human sexuality, chaos, desire, randomness and the drive to death is being laid out, in all its multifarious details, before our very eyes.
The film mostly takes place in a maze of stairwells, empty office suits, car park floors and corridors, all filmed with an expressionist brio which puts most mainstream science fiction product to shame. This seems to be a future world, one in which huge spaces exist where people can visit to indulge their most secret fantasies. It's certainly like no cruising area or club I have ever encountered, although it does refract in exaggerated shapes real illicit places of play. The most striking sequence has a contemporary dance troupe, made up of half a dozen gorgeous androgynous men, performing an obscene routine for a group of shady businessmen (and one businesswoman) who sit in a vast abandoned room on deckchairs, sipping drug-laced cocktails, voyeuristically enjoying the dancers gyrate themselves down on enormous dildos before collapsing into stupors and getting fleeced by the prancing band. There's a scene in a toilet, where a punky hunk in Marlborough logo motorbike gear picks up a nerdy office worker, takes him to an abandoned surveillance room and sexually humiliates him, sending old TVs crashing to the floor. Consumerism, advertising, fantasy and degradation cum together in a scene which even Ken Russell at his Tommy-level extremities would baulk at. In between such encounters, there is an obscure sub-plot involving a group of outcast cannibals (somewhat reminiscent of the tribe at the close of Godard's Weekend) who appear to have made their lair in the depths of the labyrinth.
Eventually, and it's a long and twisted journey, the squeaky clean blond boy ends up being sexually used and abused by a bunch of degenerates, who dress like they've been paying too much attention to the wilder reaches of the cinematic oeuvre of Mel Gibson, Mad Max or even Apocalypto.
The film is an extraordinary achievement. It shows where the urban West might be going, and it is deeply ambiguous about our descent. It could well be that spaces like this labyrinth becomes real and present, as we entomb ourselves in our fantasy lives and let our world fall to bits around us. It is a brave film, in that it both enacts the deepest, darkest fantasies of the gay subculture and also confirms the deepest fears held about that subculture by mainstream straight society. It is notable that most of the sex is bareback, which brings out the possibility that what you are watching is not merely an artistic depiction of a dance of death but real people actually flirting with it.
Way Down brings together a lot of different influences - from Fellini and Jarman through Tony Kaye ads to performance groups like DV8 (occasionally the action is punctuated by jagged dance encounters between random strangers) and Archaos - yet offers something the like of which I have never quite encountered before. I never even dreamed something like this movie could have existed. I think that whoever Ebo Hill is, he deserves to be given some credit for possessing a singular vision and using both the porn and narrative cinema in ways I have never seen either used before. The thing is, for all it's excess and oddness, the film makes a great deal of sense as a way of seeing a certain subset of the contemporary Western mind. There's a part of us which doesn't want order and productivity but rather absolute hedonism, random intensity, degradation and Thanatos. Way Down is a film which Foucault might have relished, had he lived to see it. The fact that he didn't live to see it is down to his actually having, to a great extent, lived it. It is a daringly philosophical film, an encounter with some of the most puzzling, risky and totally unacceptable thinking in our age. And thinking, of course, leads to doing.