Not Like This
Molly Manning Walker’s first feature has a point to make, but a bit more ‘feature’-ing would have been nice too.
How to have Sex
Director: Molly Manning Walker • Writer: Molly Manning Walker
Starring: Mia McKenna-Bruce, Lara Peake, Enva Lewis, Shaun Thomas
UK / Greece • 1hr 31mins
Opens Hong Kong July 7 • IIB
Grade: B
Why doesn’t she stop? Why doesn’t she just leave? Why did she go with him? Why didn’t she say something? Why didn’t she tell someone?
These are the questions debuting writer-director Molly Manning Walker’s How to Have Sex is probably going to raise as you watch her 16-year-old protagonist, Tara, fumble through her best/worst gal pal vacation ever. And that’s kind of the point – with another question being Why the fuck do we ask young women these questions to begin with?
Manning Walker’s lean, efficient drama is, at its heart, a coming-of-age tale. It’s a classic rite of passage drama that sets a young woman on a quest to rid herself of her virginity while on post-graduation vacation in a party town in Crete. Contrary to what the title suggests, there’s nothing funny about Tara’s adventure; it’s not Losin’ It, or American Pie, or Superbad, or even The 40-Year-Old Virgin. And in case you didn’t notice it, those movies are mostly about guys. Tara’s virginity quest is a very different beast. Manning Walker roots the drama in tricky late-teen/twentysomething dynamics, conflicting and nebulous expectations placed on women and internalised misogyny, most of it familiar but unspoken – and a direct line to not saying anything about workplace harassment for fear of being a “wet blanket” or, better yet, getting fired. That shit starts here, says Manning Walker. If only she’d given us actual characters to watch in between the messaging.
Not a great girls trip
It’s a tale as old as time. Tara (Vampire Academy’s Mia McKenna-Bruce, in reality 27-year-old mother, so suck it Grease), and her besties Em (Enva Lewis) and Skye (Lara Peake) jet off to Greece for their last jollies together. Em scored well on her exams (this again) so she’s off to university, while Tara and Skye aren’t so confident in their results and so their futures. Tara’s mother is supportive, telling her “Just do them again, no big” and Skye is pretty sure her mother doesn’t even realise she’s out of town. Fortunately (or not) the remainder of what makes up the girls’ identities are handy archetypes: Tara is the overly-extroverted one that’s eager to please, Em kills two birds with one stone by being Black and a lesbian, Skye is the slutty one.
The trio gets to their hotel and Tara, being a gadfly, talks them into a better room, facing the pool and next door to Badger, Paddy and Paige (Shaun Thomas, Samuel Bottomley and Laura Ambler), similarly minded, Solo-cup hoisting revellers. Turns out Badger’s a pretty good guy, and he takes a liking to Tara – though it seems Skye does as well, and being the more sexually experienced one tries to pawn Tara off on Paddy. The second-last night of the vacation goes horribly awry and Tara does rid herself of that pesky virginity for all the wrong reasons in all the wrong ways.
Manning Walker’s aims are crystal clear, and she and (especially) cinematographer Nicolas Canniccioni create a perfect space for storytelling, enveloping Tara, and us, in the noisy, neon, boozy weekend vibe that’s a breeding ground for flowering insecurity and bad decisions disguised as “being a good sport” or “letting loose”: the fateful club party night is a brilliant mishmash of sound, silence, vivid colour and fading backgrounds that forge a sense of solitary unease. The rest of Manning Walker’s aims are low-key examining the social structures that have led Tara to believing her virginity is a problem of some kind, that have led her to thinking she has to catch up, and have led a lot of young (straight) men to believing sex with women is a birthright. Manning Walker sprinkles in moments that will be chillingly familiar to most women in the audience, and by extension examines the nature of consent, and what makes it such a lightening rod for debate when it should be much clearer.
How to Have Sex makes its point but it’s let down by dodgy characterisation that turns Tara into a curiosity on an intellectual level rather than a person to empathise with. We’re told Tara, Em and Skye are best mates, but little unfolds among them that suggests a shared history; there’s no shorthand, no bland shooting of the shit over breakfast, no pre-emptive gestures that would exist with longtime friends, so on that front it doesn’t really earn its yah-yah sisterhood position. This is not a very good female friendship. Which is not to say McKenna-Bruce doesn’t single-handedly give How to Have Sex some emotional heft. She walks the fine line between brash confidence and uncertainty with painful authenticity, and in doing so gives Tara the complex personality Manning Walker’s script doesn’t. McKenna-Bruce is great and she deserves to be more than just a talking point, no matter how important the point is. — DEK