‘How to Have Sex’: The dark side of teen movies and hooligan tourism

In Molly Manning Walker’s directorial debut, How to Have Sex, a morning-after view of a deserted nightclub street — ravaged by the kind of bacchanal often associated with the party town of Magaluf on Spain’s Mallorca island and its hordes of uncontrolled British youths — shifts the movie’s perspective and mood. The sidewalks are littered with garbage while Tara, wearing a fluorescent green mini dress, walks unsteadily home with a monumental hangover. Alone in the silence of the deserted street, she wipes her tears and pulls herself together before rejoining her friends in their rental apartment. The scene splits the story in two: the euphoric clubbing tone moves into something much darker and sadder.

Played by Mia McKenna-Bruce, who won Bafta’s Rising Star Award recently, Tara is one of three girls who have traveled to the party town of Malia in Crete, Greece (the director’s preferred choice was Magaluf, but she failed to get a license) to enjoy a holiday in a gated community promising 24/7 debauchery. Of the three, Tara alone is a virgin and the toxic pressure exerted on her by her friends to lose her virginity is at the root of her anxiety.

A film that won the Certain Regard award at the last Cannes Film Festival, How to Have Sex becomes an examination of the delicate and opaque issue of sexual consent among adolescents and how a precarious sexual education can lead to abuse. Almost always with camera in hand and keeping close to her protagonist, Manning zooms in on an environment in which sex is freely talked about yet feelings remain taboo, with emotional elements such as empathy, companionship and affection ignored in a rite of passage exposed here in its crudest form — as a cold, clumsy and careless procedure.

Tara’s muted discomfort, the differing attitudes of the two young men in her sphere as well as those of her two friends unfold within the context of casual sex and hooligan tourism that Manning depicts so well — a liquid and blurry ambiance saturated by neon lights, shots and hangovers, unmade beds and sticky terrace floors. Like a hypersexualized and broken Disney dream, Tara hides her pain so as not to appear childish, and to keep alive the lie that she feels strong, a motif consolidated by the film’s final song. Through stark contrasts, Manning staunchly defends the need for tenderness in sex, whatever the current trends may be.

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