How to Have Sex: Perfunctory Title Belies Wallop of Message in New Drama
By Kim Hughes
Rating: A
It would be fascinating if director Molly Manning Walker’s riveting but deeply uncomfortable How to Have Sex was scooped up by high school educators for in-classroom viewing and debate.
The title is titillating enough to grab young ears. Yet the story at its core — about three college-age British women looking for thrills on holiday in Crete but instead finding some hard truths — would surely prompt discussion about consent, optics, and forethought that should be happening everywhere all the time and not just among women.
When we first meet rowdy pals Skye, Em, and Tara, they have just landed in the town of Malia, and are psyched to experience “the best holiday ever.” Loud, profane, and determined to “get laid” — especially virgin Tara — the three are nightmare hotel neighbours... unless you happen to be college-age British men looking for thrills on holiday in Crete, in which case the arrival of the trio is like the joyful appearance of hors d’oeuvres at a party.
From the outset, a sense of danger snakes through the boozy poolside and nightclub settings backdropping the holidayers, who are clad in little more than tattoos. The central women and those in their orbit immediately break all the rules of “how not to get raped” that are, sadly but irrevocably, still enshrined in the female psyche from childhood.
Of course, no one should have to vigilantly monitor their wardrobe — and on some level, the characters’ apathy towards modesty might be interpreted as flexing their autonomy. But a millennia’s worth of bad behaviour is hard to overhaul in a generation only once removed from a time when a boss chasing his secretary around his desk passed as mainstream television comedy.
What should be versus what actually is: this is the line the filmmaker and her protagonists negotiate. They are teenagers, after all, and without parental oversight. And so, Sky, Em and Tara get falling-down drunk. They don’t pay attention to their surroundings or scan for potential dangers. They dress ridiculously and permit themselves to be manoeuvred into situations that are plainly unsafe.
In Tara’s unfortunate case, a surrender of vigilance leads to a surrender of agency, something Em, Skye, and Badger — a rare, nice lad in their midst — abet through their own sloppy combination of inebriation, navel-gazing, and refusal to challenge existing power dynamics. It’s ugly to watch, and it’s must-see viewing for young men and women.
Director Manning Walker keeps her camera close to her subjects, fostering an uneasy intimacy that underscores how even obvious decisions can be difficult to make under peer pressure and the hopeful gaze of someone sitting right there, saying all the right things. We are with the women in their unvarnished moments, constantly reminded of stupid choices we all have also made along the way.
The fact that the subjects are British also lends a veneer of reality as many European youth holiday hotspots have in fact specifically targeted Brits as unwanted guests, as bringers of noise, destruction, and hooliganism. But the message is nevertheless universal and doubtless resonant from Daytona to Wasaga.
Late in How to Have Sex, a lingering shot surveys the morning-after mess left by revelers on a street that had been slammed the night before. Tara is eventually seen making the so-called “walk of shame” down the deserted, detritus-lined avenue, her blazingly bright outfit in stark contrast to the grimy scene framing her.
It’s a fitting metaphor for how the film, which scored the top prize in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes last year, subtly but unmistakably conjures the horrors of the morning after, when choices — both our own and those of others with agendas — are starkly seen.
How to Have Sex. Directed by Molly Manning Walker. Starring Lara Peake, Enva Lewis, and Mia McKenna-Bruce. In theatres in Toronto (TIFF Lightbox), Vancouver, and Montreal February 9; in Ottawa and Winnipeg February 16, and throughout the winter and spring in other cities.