Director Molly Manning Walker’s How to Have Sex hums with life. It’s both dreamlike and dreadful, unfolding with a tenacity that few first-time filmmaker can conjure. The coming-of-age movie follows three teenage British girls on a summer trip to Greece; it’s their final week of freedom before they’re hurled into the ‘real world’ to look for jobs, partners, and perhaps a purpose. But the trip takes a dark turn when Tara, the liveliest of the trio, has a distressing experience.
More a tone poem than a conventional, narrative-driven film, How to Have Sex shares much in common with fellow British masterpiece Aftersun. Like that movie, which was also directed by a first-timer and unveiled at Cannes, it has the hazy impact of a suddenly remembered dream. Manning Walker based the story on her own experiences, as did director Charlotte Wells with Aftersun. The Mediterranean setting is their only superficial similarity; both stories deal with trauma and revisit incidents that shape the lives of their protagonists.
Enva Lewis, left, and Mia McKenna-Bruce in a scene from How To Have Sex.
Played in a star-making turn by Mia McKenna Bruce, Tara dedicates herself to a singular purpose during the trip. All she wants to do is to ‘hook up’ with random boys and drink till she has no memory of their faces. After a couple of uneventful days during which the three girls go club-hopping but don’t really make any new friends, Tara has a chance encounter with their next-door neighbour at their hotel.
Named Badger, he’s a particularly bright red flag, the sort of boy your friends should warn you about the moment you exchange hellos. But Badger is designed to throw the audience off. Because we’re so concerned about what he’s capable of, we stop paying attention to the more harmless-looking sort that he seems to be surrounded by. Manning Walker counts on our inherent decency to develop a protectiveness for the three girls, particularly Tara, through whose perspective we watch the film unfold.
How to Have Sex investigates the concept of consent with a clear-eyed vision. It isn’t as complicated as the world has made it out to be. The only sort of people who look for loopholes around these unwritten laws are the ones who, for some reason, feel inclined to violate them. But what makes the movie so complex, besides McKenna Bruce’s central performance, the age of its primary characters. They’re all kids; they haven’t quite figured out the difference between right and wrong. And even if they have, they haven’t developed the vocabulary or confidence to express themselves. The girls are like dogs chasing cars; they wouldn’t know what to do with a boy even if they found one. Unfortunately for them, most of the ones they’re going to come across in their lives are going to bite.
And because of their understandably underdeveloped identities, they’re left with no choice embrace cultural constructs. The movie exposes deeply flawed rites of passage such as summer sexcapades. It brings to mind that episode of How to with John Wilson, where the host bumped into a teenager on spring break, play-acting much like Tara. After a couple of days, Wilson found the kid on the beach, by himself, ruminating about the choices he’d made in life. He didn’t want to go at all, but felt that he would be singled out and mocked if he didn’t.
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Read more – Adolescence review: Netflix goes god-tier with one of the greatest shows in modern TV history
Enva Lewis, Mia McKenna-Bruce, and Lara Peake in How to Have Sex.
How to Have Sex doesn’t merely question the actions of the obvious offenders, it highlights the culture of silence that envelopes them, and ultimately protects them. Retroactively, the movie rips apart the irresponsible untruths that innumerable sex comedies of the 1990s were peddling, not on purpose, of course. But they were certainly careless about it. You’d think that this was mostly Hollywood’s doing, but, for what seemed like a decade, the most popular show in the UK was The Inbetweeners, which could be this film’s evil twin. In hindsight, a lot of what happened on that show feels positively icky.
By subverting teen movie tropes and spotlighting the very personal experience of one girl, How to Have Sex is able to make grand statements about the patriarchy, about gender, and about the teenage experience. The movie serves as a disturbing companion piece to Netflix’s Adolescence; it will be particularly satisfying to anybody who felt that the show was neglectful of the victim’s experience.
How to Have Sex
Director – Molly Manning Walker
Cast – Mia McKenna Bruce, Lara Peake, Samuel Bottomley, Shaun Thomas, Enva Lewis
Rating – 4.5/5
