Content Warning: Assault
Molly Manning Walker’s debut feature film How to Have Sex plays like a memory. Among the comforting sleaze of sweaty Boohoo bikinis and strobe lights of the Malia Strip, Manning Walker quietly explores the familiar yet haunting vulnerability of teen girlhood. The film follows Tara, a 16-year-old girl excited to be on her first rite-of-passage package holiday with her two friends Skye and Fi and their antics once they meet and form a bond with another group, mainly consisting of two boys, Badger and Paddy and their friend Gemma.
How to Have Sex explores the way in which young people conceptualise and navigate sex in a way that initially arouses familiar smiles but gradually erodes this charmingly awkward encounter to leave a hauntingly bitter taste. Dripping in the recognisable aesthetics of a lads/girls on tour holiday: techno music, ‘getting ready’, and steady rotations of drinking and hangovers, the film’s plot is a scene most of us have seen before. Furthermore, the main theme of the film is a coming-of-age classic: teen virgin looking to get laid.
However, Manning-Walker uses the conventions of social realism to explore the sinister implications and consequences of navigating such heterosexual dynamics as a young woman. Initially, this is relegated to denotations of the social contract one enters into as a young woman meeting lads on a party holiday: the question of sex hanging over the group dynamic like a sword of Damocles. Reflecting reality, this is played both for laughs and unease.
Mia Mckenna-Bruce’s performance as Tara wonderfully elicits a feeling of familiarity and protectiveness (I immediately recognised her as Tee from Tracy Beaker Returns.) She takes the character of a teenage girl doing her best to grow up quickly despite not being so sure of herself and injects her with vitality and vulnerability. The dynamic between Tara, Skye and Fi is also played as devastatingly real. Skye, throughout the film, embodies the destructive impact of insecurities relating to the pressure on young women to be sexually appealing to their male peers. Skye’s character is confined to the ‘pick-me’ archetype; she repeatedly undermines Tara socially and ultimately fails to protect her as she focuses her attention on how she is perceived by their new male ‘friends’. This dynamic, as it becomes more overt throughout the film, plays on common dynamics of girlhood, revealing the situation as ultimately sad. In contrast, her friend Fi, a lesbian, does not suffer from the same tendencies but spends a lot of their holiday focused on her fling with Gemma, not realising Tara has been struggling until their flight home.
How to Have Sex feels like a lot to take in over 90 minutes. It’s chaotic, bright, funny at times and yet by the end one is left heavy-hearted at best. Manning Walker leaves you ruminating on the ways in which current social expectations fail to protect young people, particularly young girls. Almost like a hangover, once the credits rolled, I found myself wanting to vomit, cry and go to bed.
“North East Coast of Crete – Aug 2008 – Islands in the Mist” by Gareth1953 All Right Now is licensed under CC BY 2.0.