Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Molly Manning Walker
Starring: Mia McKenna-Bruce, Lara Peake, Samuel Bottomley, Shaun Thomas, Enva
Lewis, Laura Ambler
Just as tens of thousands of American teens descend on the Mexican
resort of Cancun every Spring Break, upon finishing school similar
numbers of British and Irish kids head to various tacky destinations in
the Mediterranean for a week or so of debauchery. It's a ritual, one
last blowout before heading to college or starting a soul-crushing job
or facing the dole queue.
The thing about rituals though is that they're not always undertaken
voluntarily. Given the option, few kids would probably bother with their
first communion or confirmation, but they give in to pressure from their
parents. Once kids hit their teens they start to question their elders
while doing everything their peers expect of them. How many of those
teens who head to Spain or Greece actually want to spend a week
listening to the sort of awful Eurodance music that has cursed the
clubbing scene since the '90s? How many want to spend their time in the
company of thousands of drunken plonkers puking off balconies and into
penis-shaped swimming pools? How many are ready to give in to the
pressure of losing their virginity in such a setting?
Like Charlotte Regan's
Aftersun, in which a possibly suicidal father tries to keep it together while
on holiday with his daughter, writer/director
Molly Manning Walker's debut
How to Have Sex similarly explores the horrors of enduring
forced fun. Its young protagonist isn't suicidal, but she's as out of
place in the raucous Greek coastal town of Malia as
Aftersun's protagonist was at that film's Turkish resort.
17-year-old Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce) lands in Malia with her
friends Skye (Lara Peake) and Em (Enva Lewis). The trio
keep telling each other they love one another but we suspect their
friendship is coming to an end. Tara sticks out from her companions in
several ways. A virgin, she lacks their sexual experience, but Skye and
Em seem worldly in other ways. There's a subtle class difference
distinguishable by their accents: the working class Tara seems to make a
conscious effort to speak "proper" while her more middle class buddies
affect an unconvincing street patois, with all three ending up in an odd
middle ground that might have viewers wishing for subtitles at points.
Tara is constantly fending off phone calls from her mum, while her
friends seem free of such a burden. The girls are expecting news of
their GCSE results in the coming days, and while Skye and Em are
confident of doing well enough to nail their desired college places,
Tara suspects, along with the audience, that her results won’t be so
positive.
After a first night of drunken debauchery, the three girls are
befriended by their hotel neighbours: the affable Badger (Shaun Thomas), handsome scuzzball Paddy (Samuel Bottomley) and lesbian Paige
(Laura Ambler). Initially, there's a mutual attraction between
Badger and Tara, but the former doesn't move things quickly enough for
the latter, who is so desperate to lose her virginity it seems she'll
settle for anyone. That anyone is the opportunistic Paddy, who takes a
wasted Tara to the beach and rids her of her perceived burden. The act
is technically consensual. Paddy asks if she's ready and Tara replies in
the affirmative, but everything about her body language, which Paddy
willfully ignores, suggests otherwise. Immediately rejected by Paddy in
the aftermath of their coupling, Tara retreats into alcohol and dancing,
neither of which seem to bring her much genuine joy. And then her exam
results arrive…
For some young people it can feel as though youth is forced upon them.
Personally, I loved being a kid but hated my teen years, a period when
you're expected to give up everything you enjoyed as a child but aren't
yet allowed reap the benefits of adulthood, not to mention the horrors
of school and constantly being told you're doomed to amount to nothing
(spoiler: I did amount to nothing, but in the words of Gershwin,
nothing's plenty for me). The revelatory McKenna-Bruce plays Tara as
though she's similarly uncomfortable with being a teenager and the
expectations that come with it. Towered over by her
statuesque-in-comparison friends and practically everyone else, Tara is
always the smallest person in the room, always in danger of being tread
on, physically or metaphorically. It's telling that the one time she
seems to genuinely relax and have fun is when she falls in with a
twentysomething Scottish reveller who briefly treats her as though Tara
were her kid sister. For a few hours she finds the sort of sisterhood
she likely never really felt in the company of Skye and Em.
Things take a dark turn in the final act, but by that point Tara's
spirit is so broken it's an indignity she's resigned herself to. The few
rare negative reviews of Manning Walker's film have complained that the
film doesn't explicitly address what happens to Tara late on, but that's
a take that completely misses the point of the film. There's so much
confusion in Tara's mind around what happens to her that she doesn't
know how to bring it up with her friends or if they'd even react with
sympathy. "You should have said something," Em tells Tara, but you get
the impression Em is glad Tara kept quiet so as not to disrupt the "best
holiday ever." As the girls board a plane back to England they might be
headed for the same country, but it seems they're now on very different
paths. Like so many young working class men and women, Tara is set to be
left behind.
How to Have Sex is on UK/ROI
VOD now.
