How to Have Sex: Trouble in Girl’s Paradise

Three British teenage girls go on a rites-of-passage holiday — drinking, clubbing and hooking up, in what should be the best summer of their lives.

REVIEW:

How to Have Sex is more about how not to than how to. It takes the usual girls on school holiday cliches and gives them a grim twist.

Sex tracks Tara (Mia McKenna Bruce, doing some fine work) a 16-year old on a brief, booze soaked holiday to Greece. Along with her school friends, she’s there to club hop, binge drink and eat, and hopefully hook up with some boys for some easy sex. Tara is worried about that last part. She is still a virgin and the anticipation and trepidation ebbs and swirls in her.

She and her friends form a Goldilocks trio. Em (Enya Lewis) is the nice one. Skye (Lara Peake) is the not-so-nice one. And Tara is the just right one, with equal shades of the other two in her personality. Excited and stoked the girls have come prepared for their fly, flop and fuck adventure with suitcases of bikinis, clingy party wear, and makeup. for Tara, the lone virgin, her adventure will turn into a blurry life lesson.

The director Molly Manning Walker, a former cinematographer, eases you into the party ambiance by taking advantage of actual Malia locations and with her brisk and hovering camerawork. (The director of photography is Nicolas Canniccioni.)

Walker uses a rainbow spectrum of colors to set and change the mood, to symbolically show character’s inner feelings and point to themes and ideas. She instinctively prefers light over words.

Most of the characters are the awkward type that have a hard time expressing themselves. Walker describes them visually- and it’s nice to see her chosen color palette gradually unfold. The mornings have a blue glaze. Afternoons emphasize the tones of the sun’s white glare. Night partying gets splashes of Day-Glo green and red among the black. Until the story kicks in, a good 30 minutes on, it’s the only thing distinguishing Sex from its formulaic predecessors.

The story coalesces when the girls meet a trio of boys. Badger (Shaun Thomas) a handsome Brit with spikes of blonde and brown in his hair, doe eyes and a lipstick tattoo on his neck above the words “hot legends, is the one that catches Tara’s affections, until an inappropriate beach party game has him doing something that turns her off. The ensuing complications have Tara splitting from the group and falling prey to bad boy Paddy (Samuel Bottomley) who thrusts himself on her, and eventually violates her, in a way that leaves Tara in disbelief and depressed until the end credits.

McKenna Bruce portrays Tara with graceful expressivity. Her short stature makes her look younger and appear oddly defenseless than the others. It’s almost as if she’s the artificial lamb the story seems to need and want. Paddy’s date rape of her turns Sex to its anointed conclusion. It ends Tara’s childhood and matures her into adulthood and its coming disillusionments.