Teen rite-of-passage trip frames arresting vision of trust, consent
A sharp and illuminating answer to nearly every losing-virginity teen comedy in existence, debut feature filmmaker Molly Manning Walker’s “How To Have Sex” follows three teenage British friends, all waiting to hear about their exam results, on holiday in Malia, Crete. It’s a springbreak Cancun equivalent: a nonstop barrage of clubbing, shots, puking, more shots, more clubbing, 4 a.m. chips (fries) and hookup options by the score.
In the breathless early scenes, we scramble along with Em (Enva Lewis), Skye (Lara Peake) and Tara, played by the remarkable new talent Mia McKenna-Bruce. She’s the focal point of “How to Have Sex,” in part because she hasn’t had it yet, and this girls’ trip may be Tara’s last chance — as Skye, the needling underminer of the trio, puts it. The girls are only 16. The internalized pressure on Tara, who already has confidence issues masked by a raucous sense of humor, works like a broken compass, misdirecting her instincts.
At the Malia hotel, Tara meets a boy, Badger (Shaun Thomas), a frosty-haired goofball with a lipstick tattoo. His lifelong friend Paddy (Samuel Bottomley) instantly senses their connection. He’s a competitive, callous kid at heart, and Tara senses it. But she’s also getting the nudge from Skye toward the more superficially acceptable Paddy because he is “fit.” Meantime Em, who is queer, finds her holiday diversion with Paige (Laura Ambler), the boys’ lesbian roommate.
Across a long, increasingly tense stretch of obliterating alcohol and
heartrending interactions, “How To Have
Sex” becomes an on-thefly examination of trust, consent and everything 16-year-old girls deal with. When Tara disappears one night and her roommates confront their neighbors about her whereabouts, Walker’s script (developed from a short film) flashes back to what happened between Tara and Paddy a few hours earlier. The movie is extraordinarily alert to gradations of consent and assault, and to how Tara experiences it all.
All of which makes the film sound grueling. It is, yet it isn’t. Walker, who came up as a cinematographer, and her director of photography, Nicolas Canniccioni, don’t tighten the screws for cheap suspense. It’s so much better than that. Slow zooms in on a conversation are unsettling enough, and let the reality of Tara’s emotional states come through naturally.
McKenna-Bruce will remind many of Florence Pugh; already, McKenna-Bruce can work wonders in terms of complicated emotions, and she’s magically right
as Tara. Her face, as the vacation nears its end, tells us everything, and many things at once: how she’s trying to process her feelings about what she wanted, what she got, what she can say about it and what words elude her. The ending is perhaps too neat and upbeat. But the character, and the audience, have just been through a lot. How people deserve to be treated, and the difficulty of negotiating what they deserve: It’s a huge subject. And it’s best handled the way it is here: through character and behavior and discrete moments of pain, joy and beauty.
The movie’s a bit like “Aftersun,” which dealt with a younger girl and her father on a Greek holiday. Films like that one and “How To Have Sex” help us feel what two generations of teen sex comedies — in which young women and teen girls were there for pliable decoration — didn’t give a damn about.
No MPA rating (some language and sexual material; suggested for ages 15+)
Running time: 1:31
How to watch: In theaters