Cliché-free coming-of-age tale has plenty to say

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This article was published 16/02/2024 (915 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In this sharp, assured feature-film debut from writer-director Molly Manning Walker, three working-class British girls head to Malia on the island of Crete for a long weekend of clubbing, binge-drinking and hooking up.

The trip starts with heedless hedonism. The club anthems pulse and the lights strobe. The girls drink bright blue alcopop out of giant bowls and hold each other’s hair as they puke. There’s lots of happy screaming. (“Best vacation ever! Aaaahhh!”)

It’s all so loud and raucous and glittery and drunken that it’s even more unexpected when the story opens up into something acutely observant and sad. Manning Walker pulls off some incredible tonal tightrope-walking here, evoking the reckless physical joy of youth while simultaneously unpacking something nuanced, delicate and difficult about that brief, in-between moment.

Despite the confident-sounding title, How to Have Sex is not a message movie. It’s a neon-coloured slice of neo-neo-realism that offers a frank, empathetic but unsentimental look at female adolescence.

Manning Walker manages to be sex-positive while suggesting that female pleasure and female desire often get lost in our current sexual culture. And crucially, she suggests that despite gen Z’s seeming openness about sex — here we have paid party hosts whipping up the crowd with onstage contests that are basically live sex shows — much of the discourse around sex, especially around consent, remains stubbornly stuck in the kind of silence and shame their grandmothers would recognize.

Our best-friends-forever trio includes Em (Enva Lewis), Skye (Lara Peake) and Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), but the focus is on Tara, who is aiming to lose her virginity on this trip.

The girls are 16, but they’re keeping quiet about their age, especially when they start pregaming for the nightly bar crawl with the group in the next room, which includes Badger (Shaun Thomas), an awkward, sweet guy, Paddy (Samuel Bottomley), “well fit” but with a sharper edge, and Paige (Laura Ambler), a young queer woman.

Manning Walker conveys the odd feeling of a Greek resort town catering mostly to British kids on hard-drinking minibreaks: Malia is crowded and noisy and electric by night and dismal in the light of morning, its main strip deserted except for empty bottles and trash from takeout chip shops.

Her cinematic handling of the noise and crush of club culture is technically terrific, catching that communal energy while deftly suggesting how feelings can suddenly shift. At one moment, Tara is lost in an ecstatic trance; the next minute, she’s isolated, alienated and overwhelmed.

Back at the hotel, Manning Walker continues to cover layered emotional terrain. Even with the sparse dialogue, we get a vivid sense of the girls’ friendship, its deep strengths but also its potential fault lines, as when news from home about exam results subtly changes their dynamic.

McKenna-Bruce delivers a breakout performance, her character starting out confident and brash but turning inward after her first sexual experience. We see how Tara is unsure how to talk about what happened, even to herself.

Manning Walker handles this hinge-point in a way that is understated and never exploitative. With honesty and clear-eyed compassion, How to Have Sex refracts the girls’ “best vacation ever!” through an arthouse lens into something as complicated and open-ended as real life.

alison.gillmor@winnipegfreepress.com