By Anna Johns
How to Have Sex is a deeply uncomfortable film. Not because it is overly graphic in its depiction of sexual assault, but rather because, throughout its short 90-minute run, I couldn’t shake an agonising feeling of déjà vu.
Remember when this was you? the film whispers. There’s the post-exam, early wake-up calls because you had booked the cheapest flight for your girls’ trip, which inevitably was a 6:00 am Ryanair flight from Stansted. The frantic, hourly texts from your mum to check that your plane hadn’t, in fact, fallen out of the sky mid trip. The crinkle crisps and bottles of vodka that you could convince yourself would work as breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the next four days. The colour palette is awash with nostalgia; the film shimmers with luscious pinks and oranges, reminiscent of your first foray into sun-bathed freedom. Blurry camera work and light-bathed montages capture the kind of binge-drinking you could only ever have hacked at sixteen.
How to Have Sex follows three teenage girls, Tara, Em, and Skye, on their post-GCSE girls’ holiday to Malia on the Greek island of Crete. Though their fears about their futures and apprehensiveness about their forthcoming results linger in the background, they are mostly concerned with who will be the most successful in their four-day shagfest.
As she sits awkwardly bundled up on the sun lounger, Tara is bombarded with messages of loud sexuality. Sheepishly, she watches the men and women of her resort interacting, avidly curious about these performances of flirtation. Uncannily cheerful holiday reps encourage guests to get off with each other, whilst intimate, muffled bathroom conversations reveal the awkwardness of these girls trying to figure out what exactly it is they’re supposed to be doing. As Skye nearly reveals Tara’s virginity to the group at large, her discomfort is obvious, and it’s impossible not to feel sympathy. Hasn’t every girl been scared of being too uptight, too prudish? Haven’t we all been confronted with the insatiable need to be seen as sexually liberated, to be laissez-faire with our virginities, to be the cool girl.
After a sexual interaction that toes the line of consent, silent close-ups on Tara’s face show her wrestling with the enormity and yet the apparent insignificance of what has happened to her. Her reactions capture the universal feeling of ‘it wasn’t supposed to be like this’. As she stumbles down the deserted strip in broad daylight, seemingly a million miles away from the camera, we’re hit with the overwhelming reminder that she’s just a kid, after all.
Molly Manning Walker’s debut feature doesn’t deal simply in black and white. The problem lies more in ignorance than insidiousness, as she captures the blurry boundaries for young girls’ first sexual experiences, who are told repeatedly: come on, this is what everyone else is doing! Tara’s awkward flirtation attempts show her grappling with the expectation that she should be throwing herself into it all, at the expense of her gnawing feeling that something is amiss.
There are no blow-out confrontations – Tara doesn’t even admit what has happened to her until the final moments of the film. The unshakeable feeling that something is wrong simply bubbles underneath the surface, as we watch Tara bottle up her emotions. As the camera focuses on her reflection in the mirror, it’s clear that questions are flying around her head: it was yes once, why shouldn’t he think it was yes again? How do I find someone to blame? How does he get to move on when it feels like I’ll have to live with this forever? And God, doesn’t everyone feel like this, even a little bit?I’m not rushing to rewatch How to Have Sex. But it’s important viewing in an age where girls are bombarded with messages that scream that they must be having casual sex to be liberated, that it’s their duty as good feminists. It reminds us that sometimes a ‘yes’ is constructed by our outside influences, and that consent is an ongoing conversation rather than just a tick-box question.