THE “WORLD’S” OPINION – MUST SEE
They are ready for the best vacation of their young lives. Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), Skye (Lara Peake) and Em (Enva Lewis), 18, arrive with glitter in their eyes in Malia, on the island of Crete, famous for its gigantic parties. For a few days, they will drink, flirt, dance until the early hours… And the one who brings someone back to the apartment will be entitled to the big bed. Tara is undoubtedly the one who is looking forward to the most from this stay. She has never had sex, her two friends know it, and she hopes to meet someone in the middle of all this concrete. The tattooed blond from the balcony across the street, Badger (Shaun Thomas), might do the trick.
Nothing very original, but How to Have Sex, the first feature film by British director Molly Manning Walker, awarded at the Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard prize), achieves an almost ethnographic dive into the strangely formatted (very heterocentric) world of partying on an industrial scale. Where the feeling of crazy freedom that floats in the air is also akin to confinement, like during a stay that is too well organized. The viewer discovers this whole circus through the eyes of Tara, an endearing heroine who embraces her naivety as much as her determination to enjoy every moment. So she goes, when the leaders of these orgiastic evenings (and days) push the young people to go ever further, into sexual and alcoholic games, as if the boys and girls were performing rites of passage. He did it, she did it…
The thirty-year-old director and screenwriter turns it on all the stops – that of sound (the girls’ uninterrupted discussions), color (flashy outfits) – and films the space like a succession of boxes (the cramped volume of the rooms, the overcrowded pool of the swimming pool, crowded dance floors), transforming the tumult into a sensory experience. Under the sun or laser lights, the camera captures a compression of seductive and enjoyable bodies, as in spring breakers (2012), by Harmony Korine.
Hangover
Tara will get closer to Badger (the good guy behind the handsome guy), but it is with another friend, Paddy (Samuel Bottomley), that she will go to the beach to end the night. They bathe, hold each other, she’s not sure she wants to sleep with him. He continues the approach on the wet sand, talks to her about her beauty and, when he lies down on Tara, after having obtained from her a ” Yes “, we feel a sense of unease. The next day, a new report with the same boy raises doubt about the lack of consent: the rape without noise, while Tara sleeps and drinks the alcohol from the day before, takes place in broad daylight, in the bedroom of the apartment, while friends chat on the other side of the door.
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