By Jake Fitzpatrick
On a recent rainy Tuesday night, I booked a cheap student ticket to go watch the festival darling, How to Have Sex. A coming-of-age film about a group of sixteen-year-olds going on a rite of passage summer holiday to Malia for “the best holiday evaaaa”. The film is an hour and a half of technicolour sweat, cheap booze, cheap hotels, young people bliss. A throwback to the time in your life when you worked in a bakery and could barely afford a box of chips and your mum still bought your shoes.
Exploring familiar themes of sex, consent, drinking, and drugs, to some it might sound like a track already trodden. However, I would not dismiss it too quickly. This film is an actual experience. It’s so realistic that it almost feels like you’re watching a documentary. You can imagine Louis Theroux in the corner asking honest questions to the girls on the streets about their outfits.
It’s also a mirror. Being parroted back at me were my own experiences of ‘schoolies’. Of navigating oneself through knife-edge fun which, in a split second, could turn dangerous or criminal. There is something every young person will be able to relate to in this film. An outfit choice, an experience, a quote. I can guarantee it. It also just feels entirely fresh. It doesn’t shy away from the all-too-familiar horrors of being a young person. So important is the message, that had I had a film like this when I was younger, I know I would have behaved differently in certain situations. So why aren’t we watching it?
For a cheap Tuesday, the cinema was next to empty. Of those that were there, most were almost double or triple the age of the characters onscreen. None of my friends have seen this film. Many had not even heard of it until I told them to watch it. Why? I wondered. When a film like this could help so many people navigate through adolescence that much easier.
How to Have Sex has made a little over $50k at the Australian box office, which includes festival play. Last weekend it had a screen average of $200 on 36 screens. This is not proportionate to the quality or significance of this film. However, it isn’t alone. Scrapper, another indie film made by an exciting female filmmaker, about a young father trying to reconnect with his daughter, played for weeks and scraped together a total of $235k, but was hardly a breakout. Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir and its sequel were barely released in Australian cinemas.
As we all know, making indie cinema is an uphill battle. Having A24 as a distributor or production company assists, but even then, it’s a struggle. Competing with blockbusters, many indie films get drowned out amongst the noise, even in traditional arthouse cinemas.
However, these movies do end up getting seen, eventually. They get absorbed by a streamer and young people do find them whilst bored on a Thursday night. They give them a watch through phone checking every three minutes.
Now, no one knows the exact ingredients to a film’s success. The goalposts are always changing. Every move to attach a star or change directors is effectively another method to mitigate the risk. Effectively, filmmaking is throwing spaghetti onto a wall in a calculated manner and hoping it sticks. But why don’t people watch arthouse coming-of-age movies anymore?
It’s not a question of quality. The films are brilliantly made and written. To me, it’s first and foremost a symptom of the cost-of-living crisis. The common trend is that many flock to the cinemas to watch blockbusters and ‘experience’ films, and they watch indie films at home.
Many young people might feel it unnecessary to watch coming-of-age films when they can stay in and watch these stories on streaming platforms (Euphoria, Normal People, One Day) for a fraction of the price. Whilst this is true, these films are not going to continue to be made unless further precedents are set of their profitability.
Films are a rare form of magic. They have worth and they offer gifts and memories that stick with you. So, I say go out there, watch them in a darkened room with strangers and support indie cinema.
You won’t regret it, I promise you.