'How to Have Sex' Review: Going Too Far, Too Fast in Greece

Together, the girls are a nightmare. Three giggly, swaggering 16-year-olds, the kind of girls you pray don't sit near you on a plane, whose screaming, unconscious exuberance you'd cross a six-lane highway to avoid. The kind that, if we're honest, you might have once been, for a brief moment before adulthood burst in and separated you from the circle like a charm from a bracelet.

The extraordinarily insightful “How to Have Sex” accomplishes many feats of audacity: Nicolas Canniccioni's alcopop hangover cinematography, James Jacobs's chem club anthem score, Mia McKenna-Bruce's central twist. But most impressively, first-time writer-director Molly Manning Walker gets us to not only forgive her central triad for her brash, stupid bravado, but to grieve when she's gone. Set in Malia, on the island of Crete, “How to Have Sex” is a different kind of Greek tragedy: not a great myth, just an everyday, painful observation of what the world does to girls and what the world does to girls. forces them to do. for themselves.

Tara (McKenna-Bruce), Skye (Lara Peake) and Em (Enva Lewis) are three teenagers whose trip to Crete, in traditional Brits Abroad style, has absolutely nothing to do with Cretan culture or history. . They will not visit the ruins of the Minoan palace of Knossos. Instead, while they wait for their exam results, they're here to get drunk and get laid (in Tara's case, for the first time).

Bullying their way into a room upgrade at their hotel, they spray each other's dresses with spray tans and go out dancing and drinking. It's a raucous night that ends in slurred affirmations of eternal devotion in an alley, clasped hands slick with french fry grease. But the next day, faux-worldly Skye declares it a disaster, because neither of them hooked up.

So when Tara catches the attention of Badger (a superb Shaun Thomas) from the adjoining balcony (“Hey, smoke show,” is her opening tactic), the girls accept the invitation to party with him and his partner Paddy (Samuel Bottomley). ), the cocky alpha to Badger's ditzy beta. Tara and Badger have a cozy, natural chemistry: her necklace spells “angel” in bright gold letters; He has a tattoo on his neck of a lipstick kiss. But Skye, motivated perhaps by the sexual rivalry that ruins many female friendships, maliciously insists that Tara can “do better” and encourages her to get closer to Paddy. She leads to an encounter on the beach that Walker initially hides in his film's only small crease in time, but which we come to know intimately as each beat repeats in Tara's mind.

The genius of Walker's vivid, carefully observed film is that, beneath the strobe lighting and neon, we can't see the seams. We can't pinpoint why Tara's small, unconvincing “yes” of consent sounds so unmistakably like a “no.” We can't isolate the single culprit responsible for the growing unease he feels in retrospect, unease that clouds close-ups of McKenna-Bruce's pretty, shiny face and can drown out the beat of dance music until all you hear are the waves. and their own. shortness of breath. Of course we can't. That “yes” was generated by a coercion that began long before Paddy's insistent groping, long before the girls arrived on the island, long before any of them knew what sex was, let alone how to have it.

But even if Tara realized that her “yes” was generated by 16 years of immersion in a culture that talks incessantly about sex without saying anything useful about it, society is too big a target to scapegoat, so Of course, she ends up blaming herself. , crushing her misery beneath the makeup, the glitter, and the injections. Em pursues a lesbian flirtation. Skye gets down to business with Badger. Paddy ignores Tara, until she crawls into her bed, interpreting that tense “yes” as an all-access pass with no expiration date.

For all its effervescent energy, this is a sad movie (sorry for the girls, sorry for the guys) focused on the sadness that lurks in the bright spots, the pool parties, the dance podiums, and the hallway. Illuminated cosmetics counter in an airport duty-free zone. trade. “How to Have Sex” is a story of loss, but not of loss of virginity, or even of the loss of a sisterhood that seems more fractured with each new protest at being best friends.

It's Tara's loss of faith in herself and the instincts that betrayed her, the loss of the happy idiot who would rather hang out with her friends or tell dad jokes to Badger while throwing up in the bathroom than work so hard to attract interest. fleeting glimpse of a boy who has been told he is attractive. It's the loss of wonder at what sex could be, how it could transform you. Instead, Tara learns the lesson that having sex is easy. It's everything else that needs a practical guide.