Hailed at the 76th edition of the Cannes Film Festival with the Un Certain Regard prize, the first feature film by British director Molly Manning Walker explores the impulses and distresses of a trio of young vacationers.
Three friends, a seaside resort in Crete and an end of year to celebrate. How to Have Sex, first feature film by young British director Molly Manning Walker, offers an insight into the vacations of Tara, Em and Skye. In an almost traditional way Spring break American, the high school girls fly to Greece with the desire to make their Mediterranean week a stay of all the experiences and all the craziness.
Far from family authority, the three friends seem led by a few fixed ideas: drinking to the point of intoxication, dancing every night and making love as much as possible. This last desire, placed at the center of the discussions, seems particularly heightened in Tara, the main protagonist and the only one in the group who has never yet had sexual intercourse. To honor the objective, vacation days become rounds festive which the trio continues in the company of their three balcony neighbors. If these meetings seem favorable to their projects, for Tara they nevertheless mark a tipping point within her vacation and, well beyond, a tipping point in her life.
On absent horizons
While one might expect the view of sumptuous Greek landscapes, Tara, Skye and Em’s stay is not tinged with local color. The sea itself – and this despite an island destination and a coastal hotel – is marked by its rarity. The sand, the water and the blue sky are only really visible at the very beginning of the film, before they get the keys to their accommodation, before the first round evenings and the onset of the nocturnal spiral.
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At the end of this swim which inaugurates the trio’s vacation, the horizon disappears. Holidays are then spent in nightclubs, in apartments or between the barriers of the balcony. The exterior scenes do not open up the space any further: while the rooms offer less a view of the swimming pool than of the building opposite, the entire city, saturated with the fluorescent colors of hypertourism and surrounded by mountains, consecrates confinement.
In this enclosed space, the young girls suffocate. Caught in a whirlwind, a break from everything, reality catches up with them at times. Between diploma results and doubts about the future, very familiar anxieties of youth penetrate the Mediterranean dream and hit the members of the trio on very different scales. The real distress arises on the island, almost in front of everyone.
Story of a rape, aesthetics equal politics
If the title could suggest it, How to Have Sex is not a film that gives lessons on sexuality. No one makes love there anyway. The only sexual acts are non-consensual acts. Dedicating his film to “all those who have been sexually assaulted”, the director does not show rape. No voyeuristic camera or peeking through the keyhole: aesthetics equals politics. Importance is given, during and after, to the victim’s experience, to their trauma.
In this first film, Molly Manning Walker questions desire and consent. She questions the role that others have to play in these situations. Because while centering the action on the character of Tara, the director constructs an entourage with vigilance and varied intentions who, between gestures of tenderness and sincere concerns, never really extends a hand.
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The sheet
Gender : Drama
Director: Molly Manning Walker
Actors: Mia McKenna-Bruce, Shaun Thomas, Lara Peake, Enva Lewis, Samuel Bottomley, Laura Ambler, Anna Antoniades, Daisy Jelley
Country : United Kingdom, Greece
Duration : 1h28
Exit : November 15 2023
Distributer : Condor Distribution
Synopsis: To celebrate the end of high school, Tara, Skye and Em take their first vacation with friends in a popular Mediterranean resort. The trio intends to have a series of parties, drunks and sleepless nights, in the company of another group of English people they met on their arrival. For young Tara, this journey of all excesses has the electrifying flavor of the first times… to the point of dizziness. Faced with the whirlwind of collective euphoria, is she really free to accept or refuse each experience that presents itself to her?