Molly Manning Walker’s debut feature film should be required viewing in schools, in travel-company offices and in the homes of teenage girls
a female British writer-director introduced her debut feature film at the Cannes Film Festival and the intimate chronicle of a fateful European beach holiday established her as an exciting new talent. Exactly the same could be said this year. Just as Charlotte Wells’s “Aftersun” was one of the, Molly Manning Walker’s “How to Have Sex” is likely to be remembered as one of the finest of 2023.
The holiday-makers in Ms Walker’s piquant coming-of-age drama are three teenage schoolgirls from London on their first trip abroad without their parents. It’s the sort of package deal in which your plane lands in Crete at three in the morning and you have to wait for hours by the pool before you can check into your hotel room.
As the hedonism begins, “How to Have Sex” could be mistaken for a raucous gross-out teen comedy, a female companion piece to. Viewers of a certain age may well feel that rowdy, noisy Malia is hell on Earth. But the girls are so elated by their freedom, and by the goldfish-bowl-sized glasses of blue cocktails, that you can appreciate why it might feel like a paradise to them.
The film then slides smoothly from comedy to drama. One morning after she has been absent from their shared hotel room, Tara admits to her friends that she had sex the night before. Specifically, she had sex on a beach, in the middle of the night, with a boy she barely knew or liked. The encounter was on the very edge of rape.
“How to Have Sex” raises important questions about such resorts. It should be required viewing in schools, in travel-company offices and in the homes of teenage girls. But it is too vibrant and multilayered to be dismissed as a treatise on one particular issue. As carefully constructed as any thriller, yet as believable as any documentary, the film sparkles with Ms Walker’s insights. After the grim night on the beach, for instance, the holiday carries on as normal.
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