Worth: $19.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Mia McKenna-Bruce, Lara Peake, Enva Lewis, Shaun Thomas, Samuel Bottomley
Intro:
… a loud, lurid, sticky cocktail of a film, as intoxicating as it is sad and sobering.
Molly Manning Walker’s debut feature, How to Have Sex, is a loud, lurid, sticky cocktail of a film, as intoxicating as it is sad and sobering. Aesthetically and thematically, the film recalls Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers and Sam Levinson’s television series Euphoria, blending narrative tropes of the teen movie with the lush visuals of arthouse cinema.
Manning Walker’s film, though, is far more down to earth than Korine or Levinson’s shiny, hallucinogenic trips, capturing its teenagers with a tender naturalism. It follows British pals Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), Skye (Lara Peake) and Em (Enva Lewis) as they embark on a sun-soaked post-GCSE (UK version of the HSC) holiday in Crete where they drink, dance, party and, as the title suggests, try to get laid. As the only remaining virgin, Tara (whose small stature and huge round eyes accentuate her innocence) is eager to experience the rite of passage. Soon after their arrival, the girls begin partying with the boys in the neighbouring hotel room (including the kindly Badger (Shaun Thomas) and his brash mate Paddy (Samuel Bottomley)) and a troubling tale of jealousy and lust ensues.
The film does a superb job of capturing the messiness of female adolescence, carefully sketching the way in which positive feelings seamlessly bleed into ugly ones. Early in the film, for instance, an evening of gleeful drunkenness becomes a sickly nightmare when Em begins vomiting into the nightclub toilet. Later, Skye pushes Tara to participate in a risqué drinking game, blurring the boundary between good-natured encouragement and cruelty.
The film’s most complex scenes, though, are the ones that depict teenage romance. Midway through the film, after a big night of partying, Paddy invites Tara to the beach where she will soon lose her virginity. She is flattered, but unsure if she is ready for what lies ahead. As Paddy speaks, a high-angle closeup shows a plethora of different emotions play out over McKenna-Bruce’s wonderfully open face, morphing from blushed embarrassment to trepidation to supressed excitement. Here, as throughout the film, Manning Walker languishes in the intermingling of opposing forces.
While the film hurtles forward at a relentless pace, bleary mornings and wild nights flowing on from one another in an endless, sweaty stream, it comes to a head with a tight closeup of Tara’s tearstained face in her hotel room bathroom. In this moment, the film lays bare her exhaustion, living in a culture in which bad male behaviour is excused, sexual consent is readily foregone and the pressure to keep up with one’s peers is totally unremitting.
Like Tara, audiences are likely to finish How to Have Sex feeling rather devastated. However, this should not dissuade readers from flocking to the film because Manning Walker’s debut is a definite triumph. With a palette of neon and glitter, she paints an effervescent and deeply thoughtful portrait of adolescence that captures teenage girlhood in all its messy wonder.
