A podcast guest once declared that holiday resorts operate as capitalist businesses which use board shorts as their disguise and this statement has stayed with me since then. Molly Manning Walker's debut feature How to Have Sex takes place almost entirely in Malia, Crete, that particular species of party destination engineered to extract money and dignity from British teenagers at roughly equal rates. The neon. The foam parties.
The drink specials designed to render you incoherent by 10pm. The film presents an ecosystem which Walker documents through his same analytical interest that an anthropologist would display when studying economic systems. Except the currency here isn't euros. It's experience. Specifically, sexual experience. And Tara, our 16-year-old protagonist, arrives with none in her account.
Mia McKenna-Bruce delivers a performance as Tara which reaches such precise levels that it creates an uncomfortable feeling during each scene. She's small. The character Walker stands at less than five feet tall while he continuously uses her short stature to create a sense of being surrounded by people and structures that are much taller than her. The camera shows her dancing in a club during the opening scene while showing her from above and she appears as if she would blend into the surrounding crowd. Which is more or less what happens.
The system reveals its design structure through its basic organizational structure. Three girls on holiday. Tara is the virgin. The two friends Skye and Em have already reached that point which they display through their behavior. The entire group places heavy pressure on Tara to handle everything during this particular journey. It's not even subtext.
The entire story depends on this engine which Walker uses to show how everything functions through financial transactions while keeping viewers from turning their eyes away. Virginity as liability. Sex as social currency. Bodies as things to be spent.
The way the film presents Paddy stands as the main element which prevents me from sleeping. The boy Tara chooses to spend time with appears on the beach. He does not fit the definition of a monster which people tend to expect. He's just, and this is the word I keep coming back to, ordinary. "What are you so uptight for, I thought you were the fun one?"The words he speaks to her feel like a binding agreement which she never consented to. The consent here is murky in exactly the way Walker intends. There's no violence. A young woman sought something beyond her current situation yet she lacked words to express this desire to herself and definitely not to the unattentive boy.
I should say that this film made me angry in ways I wasn't prepared for. Not at the film itself, which is precise and compassionate and never once shames Tara for anything. At the systems. At the boys who learn that persistence is seduction. The girls who learned to show enthusiasm because they otherwise would be labeled as uptight. At the party hosts who stage fellatio competitions on stage like it's entertainment. Walker doesn't over-explain any of this. She just shows it. The economics of it. Who has power. Who doesn't. The space becomes available to whom while Tara experiences a gradual size reduction which makes her body approach complete disappearance.
The BAFTA Rising Star award went to McKenna-Bruce for this performance which he truly earned. She presents to us all the information Tara has about herself together with all the details Tara remains unaware of. The scenes which follow the morning bring complete destruction to the characters. That false bravado. That need to convince everyone, including herself, that it was fine.
The first light of Cretan days produces such intense illumination which makes the previous night's complete darkness seem almost too much to bear.
