Rent How to Have Sex (2023)

Ambitious tale of teenage friendship and the vagaries of sexual consent - How to Have Sex review by PD

Molly Manning Walker’s ambitious feature attempts a look at the pressures and permissiveness of teenage friendships combined with a rather didactic story about the vagaries of consent, with the result that it's much better at the former than the latter. Best friends Tara, Em, and Skye scream “Best! Holiday! Ever!” at each other during a taxi ride from the airport, oblivious to the dangers of deciding that in advance; they’ve also pre-determined that Tara — the trio’s last remaining virgin — will “get laid” by the time they go home, which proves to be another fraught case of putting the cart before the horse. Tara seems on board with the plan, and it’s not as if it’ll be hard to find a willing partner given her good looks and a ultra-hedonistic Malia beach club; alas, however, there’s no guarantee that any of Tara’s potential suitors know how to have sex any better than she does. And of course the odds are they won’t even care — not when so many of these people have been socialised to think of sex as a consecration of their own self-worth; that this is a culture which collectively diminishes notions of consent in the rush to 'experience' is an obvious target.

The film is at its best during its first half, when the thrust of Walker’s attention is focused on the nuances of Tara’s friendship with Skye and Em. As played by the excellent Mia McKenna Bruce, Tara is a multi-dimensional lead: street smart, she is brash and bull-headed in a way that disguises her relative innocence — as well as her private fear that the GCSE results will put her on a very different path than her besties. The pressure Tara feels to join the club and have sex is even more intense now that she feels like even the smallest fissure between she and her friends might fracture them apart forever, and it doesn’t help that Tara — like so many of the people she meets in Malia — seems privately convinced that everyone else is having more fun than she is. Maybe if she has another bathtub-sized drink everything will fall into place. Maybe if she finally gets laid she’ll be able to postpone her actual loss of innocence: the crushing realisation that her life may not live up to the dreams she once had for it.

The other two members of the fraternity are either too cynical or not cynical enough. Em is a rather underwritten sweetheart who’s too busy snogging her lesbian crush to notice what Tara is going through, while Skye is an insecure bully whose appetite for deep-fried cigarettes is only matched by her need to undercut Tara at every opportunity. She’s the kind of girl who only seems interested in fucking the guys her friends like, so when Tara hits it off with the bleach-blond ('Badger') who’s staying in the next room over, it’s only a matter of time before Skye casually tells him that Tara has never had sex before. Badger's good-hearted nature in this context is refreshing; by contrast, all the booze in the world can’t hide the fact that his best mate Paddy is, as Badger says much later, an absolute “nightmare of a guy.” Unfortunately, all these characters are incongruously one-dimensional for a film so attuned to the grey areas of sexual assault.

At its best, the film captures the kinds of unspoken rituals that occur within groups of excitable youth, the way certain people hover around each other and the way others can just swoop in, the paroxysms of longing and jealousy and spite and shame that are the lingua franca of being a teenager. It also captures the ways that such interactions can quickly become poisoned and dangerous. Even during an overwrought third act, it never loses sight of what these characters are willing to overlook, or why. It all ends on a soberingly painful note as Tara, at long last, sees herself with a clarity that she’ll be able to keep forever — a valuable souvenir rescued from a holiday she'll never forget.