'How to Have Sex': the pressure to lose one's virginity and the dark side of teenage cinema and 'hooligan' tourism

In

How to Have Sex

there is a moment that reveals that after the feature film debut of the British Molly Manning Walker there is a valuable insight.

In broad daylight, we are struck by the panoramic view of an empty street of nightclubs, literally devastated by one of those summer bacchanals that we associate with Magaluf and its hordes of uncontrolled young British people.

The sidewalks are littered with garbage while a girl, Tara, in her neon green mini dress, is dragging more than just a monumental hangover.

The shot closes on her figure, alone and surrounded by silence, while she wipes away her tears and composes herself before meeting up with her friends in the apartment she has rented to drink and flirt tirelessly.

It is a moment that she completely divides the story: the hitherto euphoric, shouty and party tone of the film opens up to a much darker and sadder tone.

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Tara, played by Mia McKenna-Bruce, who a few weeks ago won the Bafta for emerging actress of the year in the United Kingdom, is one of the three girls who has traveled to the Cretan island of Malia (the director preferred Magaluf, but not obtained the permits) to enjoy a closed reserve of debauchery.

From the beginning, the pressure of not having yet lost her virginity weighs on Tara's small body.

A pressure exerted in a toxic way by her own friends.

Mia McKenna-Bruce, right, in 'How to Have Sex'.

Molly Manning Walker converts

How to Have Sex

, a film that won the Un Certain Regard section award

from the last Cannes festival, in a delicate and at the same time terrible approach to the opacity of sexual consent among adolescents and a precarious sexual education that leads to abuse.

The director and screenwriter shows, almost always with a camera in hand and very close to her protagonist, an environment in which there is a lot of talk about sex but it is taboo to talk about feelings, with no room for empathy, companionship and affection in a ritual. of initiation exposed here in its crudest way, as a cold, clumsy and careless procedure.

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In that context of sex and

hooligan

tourism that the director describes so well—a liquid and blurry state of mind saturated with neons and colors, shots and hangovers, unmade beds and sticky terrazzo floors—the character's unspeakable discomfort becomes evident. central, the different attitudes of the two boys around her and also of her two friends.

Like a hypersexualized and broken Disney fantasy, Tara hides her pain so as not to seem childish and corny, to keep alive the lie of believing herself to be strong (the film's final song underlines this idea), while the film convincingly vindicates the need to live the sex with tenderness against the current.

How to Have Sex

Director:

Molly Manning Walker.

Starring:

Mia McKenna-Bruce, Samuel Bottomley, Lara Peake, Enva Lewis, Daisy Jelley.

Genre:

drama.

United Kingdom, 2023.

Duration:

91 minutes. 

Premiere: March 15.

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