The title of Molly Manning Walker’s feature-length directorial debut seems to promise a self-help guide to navigating the knotty ins and outs of physical desire. And given how it starts, with ready-to-party besties Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), Skye (Lara Peake), and Em (Enva Lewis) touching down in the coastal town of Malia in Crete, Greece, for their first holiday abroad, one might also anticipate that a redux of Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers is afoot.
Writer-director Manning Walker, though, has cooked up something far less ironic and fragmentary with How to Have Sex, though like Korine’s film, it’s interested in how the prospect of hardcore partying doesn’t transform from fantasy into nightmare in a flash. Rather, it oscillates from one to the other simultaneously, creating a gradual, narcotizing effect that makes sorting out one’s emotions, especially when they’re being newly felt, next to impossible.
Above all, How to Have Sex is a humanist reflection on how sexual violence among young adults is often born out of accumulating circumstances. Tara, Skye, and Em are at a stage of teenage life that, per a line uttered early in the film, might be called “I fucking love you guys”—that is, one in which it feels like your high school buds will remain BFFs. Manning Walker convincingly plays this sentiment straight, allowing each of the girls to define themselves through one another. Cheering, shouting, drinking, “yes and”-ing—the camaraderie of the pack, or “your lot,” to use the film’s parlance, is the ethos that defines this stage of social development.
Being attached at the hip to her mates proves challenging for Tara, not least because she’s a virgin. Enter Badger (Shaun Thomas), waving to Tara from his hotel balcony adjacent to hers. The film introduces him as a bit of a skeaze: shirtless, hungover, and playfully hounding Tara to pay him attention. But Manning Walker isn’t interested in easy types or categorizations, and unlike Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel, there isn’t a dubious agenda hidden beneath the girls-in-danger framework. Instead, characterizations deepen rather than flatten, making each look, touch, and gesture vital to grasping how each person experiences the events of days and nights that less begin and end than bleed, without clear delineation, from one into the next.
How to Have Sex’s masterstroke comes in the form of a prolonged question mark regarding Tara’s whereabouts one morning after everyone stumbles to their balcony following another rager. The film then loops back to recount Tara’s evening, which partly involves losing her virginity on the beach to Paddy (Samuel Bottomley), Badger’s best mate. The exact significance of this sex act becomes the film’s primary focus, implicitly questioning if it was consensual.
Given that Tara doesn’t initially mention these circumstances to her best friends or to anyone else, the tension around the extent to which she was coerced into sex by Paddy becomes twofold—not just a matter of what happened between them, but what will happen between them next. The ambiguity of the situation on the beach, at least in Tara’s eyes, gives her a Janus-faced gaze of sorts, as exemplified by a scene in which she slugs down shots to keep the party going, clearly having no idea how to address, or even properly understand, what recently occurred.
Few films have tapped into how adolescent desire is propelled forward by an almost self-defeating sense of wanting quite like How to Have Sex. A new track, a new drink, a new person in front of you—each potentially brings the promise of good, meaningful times ahead. The film knows this, and in many ways buys into it by depicting clubs as thumping clarion calls for anyone looking for some kind of emotional catharsis by losing themselves amid a sea of people. The flipside, as How to Have Sex has it, involves recognizing that pain and abuse are often bound up in pleasure and love, and being able to spot one versus the other proves difficult.
How to Have Sex settles into a bit more conventional terrain during its final third by depicting an unambiguous act of sexual violation. If Tara’s consent was nominally given on the beach, it absolutely isn’t when she’s in bed with Paddy the next day. And yet, given Manning Walker’s adroit handling of how such violence develops and occurs, the film still doesn’t resolve on a pat or rug-pulling point regarding all that’s transpired between Tara and Paddy or between her and anyone else she rubs shoulders with. Turns out, How to Have Sex winds up delivering on the promise of its title, as this is a truly instructive film about sexual politics, though a remarkable one for largely leaving emotions unresolved and relationships feeling messy.
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