Flasz On Film

There are many ways the perennial coming-of-age story may be told, but having scratched my head a little bit I can perhaps determine two major modes many filmmakers often gravitate toward, differing from one another in the perspective of the storyteller.  

For instance, when the filmmaker filters their gaze through a lens of their own nostalgia-underpinned semibiographical recollections, what you might end up with is a story perched somewhere in the realm of subjective and occasionally magical realism, which I prefer to call romantic realism. This is where you’ll find Richard Linklater movies like Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some, George Lucas’ American Graffiti, Stand by Me, Mud, Mid90s, Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, Honey Boy or Lady Bird, though I might come back to the latter example in just a second. 

Another way to do this would include assuming a perspective of a bystander anthropologist recording the coming-of-age story like a war correspondent with a penchant for intimacy. Think of Larry Clark’s Kids or Harmony Korine’s (who, let’s not forget, wrote Kids too) Spring Breakers. Think Rocks or Minding the Gap. I suppose the main logical difference between these two mods comes from the disengagement of the camera from the voice of the storyteller who instead assumes the role of a witness, as opposed to someone who not only identifies with the characters in the film, but most importantly feels their stories are either partially or wholly inspired by their own life experiences.  

Now, there’s likely way more ways you can execute on a coming-of-age narrative in a successful and intriguing way, all of which add something to the collected body of the medium of cinema. You can filter the story through a genre lens (Carrie, Christine), add an arthouse slant to that genre warp (Fits, Thelma), make it into a full-on period-set chamber drama (Little Women), or a genre-adjacent satirical true story with a rock and roll heartbeat (The Bling Ring). Base it on Dostoevsky and set it in middle-of-nowhere America (Paranoid Park). Make it into a fairy tale (Beasts of the Southern Wild, Scrapper). The world is your oyster. There’s literally a million ways you can spin a coming-of-age story and it will probably work for someone because these experiences – varied as they can be in retelling – are simply incredibly general. 

However, the two modes I mentioned at the top – the mode of subjectively nostalgic romantic realism and the mode rooted in fly-on-the-wall vérité – seem to feature most prominently in the landscape of modern cinema. And their paths rarely cross because they’d require the filmmaker to assume two different perspectives concurrently. I suppose this is where I could come back to the interesting example of Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird which is predominantly rooted in nostalgia-driven romantic subjectivism, but it occasionally comes close enough to cinéma vérité to allow the viewer to cohabit the headspace of its central character, who is most decisively tethered to the filmmaker herself. Though, the movie as a whole is still defined by its subjective romantic realism.  

This brings me to How to Have Sex, directed and written by Molly Manning Walker (who served as cinematographer in Scrapper I name-dropped a few paragraphs ago), which seems to have found an interface between these two main modalities of coming-of-age storytelling, or a way to bridge the gap between the requirements of vérité realism and romantic realism. And by the looks of it, the trick is to embed the viewer’s gaze within one of the characters, who also sees herself as an interloper in the group she is with. That’s Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), who is out on holiday with two of her friends: Skye (Lara Peake) and Em (Enva Lewis). All three are about to go to college in the Autumn and fly to Greece for a trip hoping to party hard and hook up. Interestingly, what sets Tara apart is the fact she is a virgin and this escapade comes to her with considerable stress because she feels pressured by her peers to submit herself to the rite of passage of having sex with someone she barely knows. What unfolds is an intriguing account that’s delivered mostly in the style of cinéma vérité, but where we are no longer just a fly on the wall, but a passenger in Tara’s head.  

We hang out with her and her friends, witness their interactions with boys they meet (Shaun Thomas and Samuel Bottomley) and observe as their modern teenage courtship unravels awash in awkwardness and underpinned by a barely audible low frequency hum of impending threat. This wouldn’t be possible to achieve with such potent oomph without the story being nested in Tara’s headspace. I’m sure we could suss it all out and empathize with what she’s going through, just as we can empathize with Jennie in Kids, but from the vantage point of a bystander anthropologist interested in teenage drama we wouldn’t understand the half of what Tara goes through in the movie.  

However, thanks to the filmmaker’s choice to only use the visual language of detached fly-on-the-wall observationalism and confine her perspective for the most part to seeing the world through Tara’s eyes (with a few exceptions involving following the story when Tara mysteriously disappears for a little while), How to Have Sex becomes immediately perfumed with a different kind of realism that is both objectively truthful and informed subjectively by the personal experience of its central character. And this experiment of filtering a cinéma vérité aesthetic through a lens of the female experience delivered in crucial moments from a first-person perspective is what makes this movie a powerful cinematic experience.  

Molly Manning Walker’s film enables the viewer to see what the teenage experience is like nowadays, and crucially, to feel what it’s like to be a young female coming of age under such circumstances. And it’s a harrowing psychological horror show of navigating toxic friendships, smiling at clearly snide remarks delivered by those closest to Tara, functioning in a world full of implicit threats and ample opportunities to fall prey to various predators, and also somehow being drawn to those sketchy scenarios that could turn into something truly scary with less than a second’s notice. Such is the mind-bogglingly paradoxical reality of coming of age as a woman as described in How to Have Sex, where a young woman feels constantly pressured from all directions to essentially engage in close quarters courtship with apex predators who may or may not understand the meaning of the word “consent” to a satisfying extent.  

In fact, this whole movie is essentially a vérité study on the power imbalance between sexes and the breakage of the social contract where men fail to hold each other to a good enough standard to make their female companions feel safe in their presence. Somehow, as delineated by Walker’s camera, Tara’s formative experiences are all dominated and regulated by spikes of dopamine and adrenaline. It’s all fight or flight when it comes to hook-ups, responding to primal urges, navigating emotional dips and figuring out who your friends are at a time of utter internal turmoil. And we are almost always perched close enough to the action that we can essentially feel what Tara feels and almost experience what she goes through. We’re in her shoes when she loses virginity in an act bordering on assault. We’re with her when she feels abandoned and alone. We are in her head when she wakes up to being assaulted again, powerless and abused.  

Therefore, as much as How to Have Sex is a beautifully engineered narrative resplendent in sun-bleached photography and radiant sequences of visual discombobulation aimed to mimic the haze of the drug- and alcohol-fuelled teenage experience, it is also a difficult movie to sit through. And that’s because it enables tactile realism with a personal perspective. So, it isn’t just a cautionary tale about consent, teenage sex and the need for us a society to step up and raise boys not to be opportunistic predators and to become honourable men worthy of female companionship. It’s a first-person account depicting those things without ever over-indulging in the viscera, or trying to elicit low-rent shock value.  

As soulful as it is frightening, How to Have Sex is a unique coming-of-age story in that it is personal, but not nostalgic. It’s realistic and subjective. Grounded and heightened at the same time. It is an elusive feat in narrative storytelling that somehow bridges two distinct perspectives on the matter of delivering perennial coming-of-age narratives and finds a productive niche at the boundary between them where truth and experience not only coexist but embolden each other. Consequently, the viewer has no other recourse but to emerge both permanently unsettled and somehow empowered by Tara’s story.