In the searingly realistic How to Have Sex, three British teen girls glamorize a holiday week of binge drinking, clubbing and casual sex, so they head for the beach town of Malia on the island of Crete. Malia’s hotel and bar scene caters to British teenagers, producing a kind of a Cabo San Lucas/Daytona Beach/South Padre Island spring break culture with a lot less restraint. In Britain, kids can move on from high school at age sixteen, so this is like American Spring Break with a heavy dose of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds in the mix.
All three are gung ho on partying, but the lone virgin, Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), has the additional goal of her first sexual experience. Obviously, if a sixteen-year-old girl is determined to get as drunk as possible and lose her virginity in an unsupervised party frenzy with hundreds of drunk teenage boys, her quest can go painfully wrong in many easily imaginable ways. Hence, the joyous exuberance of the girls’ partying, is underpinned by the audience’s escalating sense of dread.
The three besties immediately self-intoxicate, meet some guys in their hotel and party essentially non-stop, cycling between poolside, beach and disco, stopping only to pass out. Rinse and repeat. How to Have Sex narrows its focus on Tara’s experience, which becomes more fraught, more emotionally isolated and devastating.
In her first feature, writer-Director Molly Manning Walker achieves remarkable verisimilitude in the weeklong party rampage, so much so that Mick LaSalle wrote, “The great strength and slight weakness of “How to Have Sex” is that it’s just like being there — except you might not want to be there.”
Anchoring herself in authenticity, Manning Walker is comfortable with ambiguity, whether in the relationships between the girlfriends or their attitudes, behaviors and feelings. She has not made a message picture, a political screed or a cautionary tale, but her audiences certainly notices organized beach games that are premised on females as sex objects and circumstances that beg the question of what constitutes acceptable consent.
The performance of Mia McKenna-Bruce as Tara is astonishingly raw, nuanced, heartbreaking and hopeful. Other critics describe it as “star-making”, which will depend on her getting material this good in the future.
The actresses playing Tara’s friends, Lara Peake and Enva Lewis, are also very, very good.
(Manning Walker was the cinematographer for Scrapper, another debut coming of age film by a female British writer-director, Charlotte Regan).
How to Have Sex is an impressive directorial debut for Molly Manning Walker, who is not afraid to make her audience uncomfortable. This is a movie more to be admired than enjoyed. How to Have Sex is streaming on MUBI.