Selling the sizzle rather than the sausage, How to Have Sex is loud and garish on the outside but gooey and emotional on the inside, a story of three teenagers on a post-exam drunken holiday in Crete, having fun like they invented partying and determined to lose their virginity at the first opportunity.
This is the feature debut by its writer and director, Molly Manning Walker, and she captures the heroic quantity of good times consumed by 16-year-old Brits Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), Sky (Lara Peake) and Em (Enva Lewis) in the pursuit of bliss in one of those holiday towns (it’s Malia) the Brits love to colonise.
Shrieks of “Babes!”, “This is insane!” and “I can’t die a virgin!” accompany a whirlwind of clubs and bars, beers and shots, as the best-friends-forever down drinks, pull finger-horn poses, sing karaoke and puke in the toilets. Followed by chips on the way home, while the trio reassure each other that they look “fit as fuck”.
If you’ve been there you’ll recognise it, but if you haven’t Walker’s camera will take you there with its neon colours, whirling frames, subjective points of view, hormonal edits and a sound design that selectively brings different elements into focus. At one point Tara is dancing up on a stage in a club heaving with noise, yet over the top of the music we can hear her breath catching.
Enter Badger (Shaun Thomas), Paddy (Samuel Bottomley) and Paige (Laura Ambler), a tattooed trio of lairy but slightly older revellers staying in the room next to Tara, Em and Skye. Over “pres” – pre-loading of drinks before heading out – Tara takes a liking to laddish but protective Badger but it’s Paddy who eventually swoops in for the spoils, in scenes on a beach where consent may or may not have been wholeheartedly given.
It’s technically a brilliant film, but emotionally an even better one, thanks in large part to the central performance by McKenna-Bruce as Tara, the brash exterior hiding a little girl lost who’s really not sure about sex. McKenna-Bruce is actually about ten years older than the character she’s playing but you’d be hard pressed to pin her as mid-late 20s. She’s also remarkably free of actorly tics, and considering that she’s been doing this a long time – she was in a stage production of Billy Elliott when she was ten – that’s doubly remarkable.
Via McKenna-Bruce’s Tara, Walker maps the terrain of the post-MeToo world, but that is as far as she goes. This is emphatically not an issue movie. Instead the focus is on Tara’s feelings. A film that felt at one point like it was heading in one direction goes off decisively in another, and becomes the story of the girl who has plumped for the wrong guy.
Thomas is very good as the very likeable Badger, but Samuel Bottomley has the much harder and less simpatico role as the eager Paddy, aggressively pursuing his goals with a single-minded focus until he’s got what he wants.
It is, as the prizegivers always say, invidious to have to choose a winner and in truth it’s the ensemble playing rather than McKenna-Bruce, Bottomley, Thomas or any individual actor that make this work as well as it does.
Relationships are not what they always appear. The path of true love never runs straight. Coming of age is tough. in How to Have Sex the main lesson learned is that sex is like exams: something you have to get past, often under less than ideal circumstances.
But ultimately issues and lessons and log lines aren’t what this movie is about. It’s about simple emotions and the power they have. As Tara, Em and Skye head back to the airport and home and the rest of their lives, one of them is nursing a broken heart. And you feel her pain, you really do.
How to Have Sex – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
