Here’s a cause for celebration for fans of British cinema: a feature debut that launches not one but two of the most promising talents to arrive in movie theatres for a long while. Writer and director Molly Manning Walker is the complete package: a storyteller with an acute ear for youth vernacular; a film-maker with a gift for capturing images that sear themselves into your eyes, while also filling each frame with a sensory overload of energy and movement; and a director who can tease remarkably intimate and revealing moments from actors while simultaneously marshalling a club full of several hundred hard-partying extras. And the film’s star, Mia McKenna-Bruce, is a revelation. You have to go back to Florence Pugh’s breakout role in Lady Macbeth to find another career-making performance that so emphatically announces an actor destined for greatness.
How to Have Sex, which won the Un Certain Regard award at Cannes in May, takes one of the central themes of innumerable 1990s and 00s teen comedies – the desperate quest to lose your virginity (and preferably party to oblivion at the same time) – and peels back the riotous excess and hedonism to uncover some uncomfortable questions about the grey areas of consent and the coercive influence of peers. Walker’s handling of the film’s tonal range is remarkably assured: the picture is skittish, spirited and very funny, and at the same time troubling and bruisingly sad.
Tara (McKenna-Bruce) and her two school friends, Em (Enva Lewis), the brainy one, and Skye (Lara Peake), the bitchy one, arrive in the party resort of Malia, Crete, with the loud and frequently expressed intention of having the “Best! Holiday! Eva!” It’s the end of an era: their GCSEs are over, school is out and the future, for Tara at least, is a question mark. And the girls are committed to drinking every last drop of their newfound freedom (in the form of tureen-sized bowls of lurid blue cocktails).
You get the sense that these teens on the cusp of adulthood are trying out their idea of being a woman – like kids playing dress up. It’s a Claire’s accessories version of womanhood, all synthetic sparkles, adornment and prancing around in front of mirrors. And the same is true of sexuality: in the absence of knowing with absolute certainty what it is they want from an encounter (and crucially, how to communicate this), the girls slip into prescribed roles. This is particularly true for Tara, the least sexually experienced of the three, who, as Skye frequently points out with a cackle of derision, is still a virgin at 16.
There’s an inordinate amount of pressure (almost all of it coming from Skye) on Tara to divest herself of her virginity during the holiday. If she can’t manage it here, where sex is practically on tap along with the cheap lager, she might as well resign herself to dying a virgin, scoffs Skye, who has allocated a gruesome-looking bottle of alcoholic apple punch as a prize for whoever manages to have the most sex.
On the second day of the holiday, on the balcony overlooking the hotel’s phallus-shaped pool, Tara clicks with a lad in the hotel room next door. Badger (Shaun Thomas) is a peroxide-blond party animal with the words “hot legends” tattooed on his neck, along with a lipstick kiss. Skye dismisses him as “a clown”, directing Tara towards Badger’s smoother, cooler friend Paddy (Samuel Bottomley) instead. But then Skye has her own agenda.
Tara’s increasing discomfort with the way the holiday plays out and the sex that eventually happens is revealed not so much in dialogue – the whole point of the film is that she, and girls her age, lack the crucial vocabulary to talk about their needs and experiences – but in McKenna-Bruce’s mercurially expressive face. She is transfixing. One of the film’s most powerful scenes is the morning after a turbulent week’s worth of nights before, when Tara and her buddies are in a taxi to the airport. While the other girls sleep, Tara churns over the events of the last few days, her eyes darkening as she blinks back tears.
Equally eloquent is the film’s use of sound. In another scene, drunk and overwhelmed by earlier events, Tara attempts to lose herself in the endless party. She climbs onto a podium, but the balance of the sound mix shifts so that it’s her ragged, anxious breathing that we hear rather than the music. She’s surrounded by fellow clubbers, all of them united in joyous abandon. But at this moment, nobody has ever looked more alone.
How to Have Sex is out in UK cinemas now and will be released in Australian cinemas on 15 February
