How to Have Sex

Director: Molly Manning Walker (UK). Year of Release: 2023

Before we see anyone or anything, we hear the screams as a planeful of young holiday makers as a plane touches down. Tara (Taz), Skye and Em are one of many groups preparing for a drunken week in the Greek resort of Malia. They’re still waiting for their exam results – some reviewers assume that these are their “A” levels and that they’re 18, but it feels much more likely that they’re 16 and have just done their GCSEs.

Skye is the most self-confident of the 3, and, if you take everyone at their word, the most sexually experienced. But this is a film in which there is often a mile between what people say and who they are, so there’s no way of us verifying this. Skye gently teases Tara for still being a virgin. This is partly banter between friends, but you also sense a hint of maliciousness. Em, the one most likely to pass her exams, is the peacemaker, and is often called to mediate between her friends.

After the girls blag a poolside apartment, Taz gets up early-ish to do her make up on the balcony. While she’s there, she’s wolf whistled by the bloke in the opposite flat. He introduces himself as Badger, which is confirmed by the tattoo on his midriff. He also has tattooed lips on his neck, badly dyed hair and a Northern accent. For all this, there is something slightly charming about Badger, especially if you stand him next to his macho mate Paddy.

Badger invites the girls over to the apartment he shares with Paddy and Paige, who they reckon is a lesbian, so no competition there. They take part in pre-drinks drinks before indulging in all the games offered by the resorts – passing on drinks stored in the men’s shorts and the women’s bikini tops. A silent understanding develops between Tara and Badger, until he is hauled on stage where women are plucked from the audience to lick and deepthroat him.

On one level, I am not the target audience, and its a long time since I was a teenage girl. Watching the debauchery triggered horrible memories of sick-strewn streets and bars showing endless repeats of Friends while everyone geared up for the evening’s drinking. But I could emphasise with Tara’s sense of not quite belonging. Throughout the film her face alternates between showing delight and fear. She knows she’s supposed to be enjoying herself, but doesn’t always feel it.

When Tara goes missing and her friends start to worry about her, you realise the precarity of her gender, age and vulnerability. Yes, she might have just got off with someone, but why should we presume that? A series of shots of Tara at very close range show her wandering through the artificial village, drunk, away from her friends, and a potential prey for anyone who would like to take advantage. Which, and in a way which we don’t expect, is exactly what happens to her.

As the film goes on, you get the feeling that Tara would rather have a cozy relationship with the gormless Badger. But this is not the sort of holiday where cosiness is allowed. So she lives her virginity to someone else in an action which is not just loveless – it doesn’t even look much fun. And as we are watching the film through Tara’s eyes, and her memory of the evening is hazy at best, what actually happened could have been even worse than her brain allows her to remember.

How to Have Sex is a film about consent, but it offers no easy answers. There is no brutal rape scene, just what the odious Robin Thicke referred to as Blurred Lines. At one stage, Tara actually says “Yes”, even though the look on her face is much more ambiguous. It is less that some scumbag man has taken advantage of her, more that everyone behaves exactly as they are supposed to on this sort of package trip, urged on by the pumped-up holiday reps.

And yet in amongst all the fear, it also shows the fun people are having. We see why people go on this sit of trip, why Tara’s mates say they’ll probably go back next year. This is the best that’s on offer to most working class kids. Why not smile, join the party, and neck another shot in one? Pull up a bowl of dangerous looking blue liquid and suck from the nearest straw. As I watched the film, my mind switched regularly between exhausted despair and envy at such hedonistic joy.

This is an unsettling film, where everything which should be happy and reassuring is full of potential danger. It shows that life as a teenage girl is fun, but pregnant with the possibility of the most horrible catastrophe. Are Tara and co enjoying themselves because they’re having real fun, or because they are acting out roles which are expected of them? And does that distinction really matter? Can you not stop moaning and pass us another drink?

How to Have Sex is about the best holiday ever, and it is about existential dread. It is about getting so joyously drunk that you can’t remember what you did last night, and about the creeping terror when you start to remember individual incidents. It is much less clearcut that I was expecting. Traumatic things happen, but no-one is clearly responsible for much more than being a bit of a dick. The problems we see are more the result of an alienated society than of evil individuals.

The film’s strength is that it refuses to morally judge. It authentically shows us the world of working class teenage girls, and all the contradictions that this entails. Tara, Skye and Em are on the verge of womanhood, they are unable to fully articulate what they feel. Yet maybe they are able to enjoy themselves in a way that an ageing viewer can only dream about. This is a film which shows life as it is. It doesn’t always work, but it sure has a good go.