Winner of the Un Certain Regard Award at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, How to Have Sex allows us to throw light on some contemporary anxieties (gender relations, social norms), plus a very gifted actress: Mia McKenna-Bruce, in pole position as a future English movie star.

After the emotional havoc left in its wake by Aftersun, a touching drama about a British father and daughter spending a holiday in a Turkish resort, How to Have Sex starts off on a wave of déjà-vu: the flight attendant’s voice announcing the landing in Heraklion opens up to the same imagery of chlorine-filled pools and umbrella drinks. However, this title sounds more like a degenerate sequel: the nineties child has grown up and turned into today’s teenager, a girl eager to be just like everyone else – always smiling, always having fun, always “OK”. In the array of unearthed emotions, How to Have Sex proves to be much rougher and more blunt, replacing the golden light of all-inclusive afternoons with club strobe lights, and the melancholy of memories with a rabid, aching present. And where Aftersun turned lounging on sunbeds into a kind of madeleine of youth gone by, this film turns Crete into a stage populated by the same individuals back home: we only need to see the scene with the protagonist walking, at dawn, on a street flanked by shops and littered with garbage and junk, as after an apocalyptic night filmed in a Hollywood studio in the American desert.

Greece, like Turkey in Aftersun, is therefore just a pretext: it’s still us among ourselves, but “away”, a sort of a supporters’ group without a team to support, operating on the same logic of (self)destruction to the maximum, because life is short anyway, and tomorrow – as the protagonist screams at the end – we return home. I risked at the beginning by drawing a parallel that it’s wiser not to push too far. However, it’s impossible not to notice the timing and similarity of these two first-time directors – Charlotte Wells with Aftersun and Molly Manning Walker with How to Have Sex – almost anthropologically curious about this phenomenon of tourism from the UK. For tourism is the true backdrop of these films that turn the “expatriation” (Crete becoming a slightly sunnier England) into a vast terrain of sociological exploration. Good idea: with the frenzy of vacationers, eager – in the most all-embracing and abusive way – to “enjoy”, this increasingly widespread, unbridled mass tourism, which turns the visited country into a small perimeter to be conquered in one night, becomes an ideal laboratory for observation.

From Ibiza to Crete, Northern tourists come to forget themselves – and in this forgetting, in the almost barbaric way it occurs, lies the most eloquent kernels of today’s humanity. It’s a humanity on the brink, stripped of the signs of civilisation, reaching stages as extreme as they are familiar. That is why it is also a cliché, an emblematic image of the entire European coastline. In fact, the first half of the film relies perhaps too much on the use of this cliché, more precisely on the all too well-known tropes of spring breakers: the constant giggling of girls who want to live “the best summer of their lives”, their sappy hugs in the waves at sunset, plus the inevitable dance scenes in the club, repeated ad nauseam. The film’s dramaturgical arsenal is quite poor, trapped in these generic and overly trodden snapshots that feel like an inappropriate parody in a film that’s meant to be serious. Could it have been done differently?

Looking at the narrative progression, it seems not. As we move forward into the film, the director’s initial choices, which depict youth’s debauchery exclusively through trademark imagery, appear increasingly self-conscious. And that’s because the second half of the story is built as a subversion of the first, with all its procession of euphoric – and not at all believable – scenes waved at us. We’ve seen the approach in recent cinema, especially in #metoo-inspired fiction works (see Promising Young Woman): you take a clearly framed social reality, presented in its most stereotypical codes, then show its flip side, the horror facet, the dark lining consubstantial with the facade – aiming to make plain its systemic mechanism of producing evil.

The holiday that started with partying and sky-high excitement turns into a destructive and violent rite of passage. No change in tone, just an effective refocusing from the collective engaged in this Dionysian celebration to the singular perspective of Tara, who discovers the dark truth behind this joy of being young and carefree.

So it is here: the holiday that started with partying and sky-high excitement turns into a destructive and violent rite of passage. No change in tone, just an effective refocusing from the collective engaged in this Dionysian celebration to the singular perspective of Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce, always remarkable when playing stifled pain), who discovers the dark truth behind this joy of being young and carefree. Thrown into the sand and subjected to the urges of a hound in heat, Tara helplessly witnesses the transformation of her initial joy of carousing into a long tunnel of shame and fear. Much of the film’s success lies in the strong performance of the actress. Although relatively nuanced in showing how the girl doesn’t necessarily know what she’s doing – but that’s by no means an excuse –, the film proves to be much more rigid in the sociological construction of its secondary characters. Here lies the weakness of the story, which works too much with textbook samples (Tara’s friends are, inevitably, the laid-back, provoking chick and the empathetic black lesbian), thus risking to reduce the beautifully handled complexity of the experience into a very specific moral, a black-and-white that has nothing to do with the inexhaustible harshness of reality.

As for the male characters, they submit to the same overly Manichean scheme, featuring a sensitive and caring buffoon always on duty to alleviate – best he can – the trauma caused by the other scoundrel, who is also his best friend. In its best moments, the film forgets these archetypes and advances on a much more dangerous and thrilling tightrope, which sees the act of initiation, with all its social pressure, as a murky affair, a serious game where guilt, responsibility, abuser and victim status are muddy matters, consequences of some contexts that must be waded through as if in a muddled maze. Twenty, maybe even ten years ago, How to Have Sex would have been an exotic parable, a slightly bizarre, quickly overlooked alarm signal. Now, even despite its somewhat abstract and theoretical air, it touches on multiple sore spots that, as viewers familiar with a new politics of the body and gender, we are compelled to look at carefully.

How to Have Sex opens in cinemas on May 17. The film can also be seen at the European Film Festival, which takes place between May 9 – June 8.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.