91 minute running time … I saw this in the theater and interestingly it was subtitled, which was essential since it featured these working-class British kids on holiday in Malia (which is on Crete, a Greek island) and I wouldn’t have understood half the dialogue without subtitles … anyway, I wasn’t thrilled with this … the blurb says it’s about these kids “navigating the complexities of sex, consent and self-discovery … and how first sexual experiences should – or shouldn’t – play out.”
It also touched on the topic of female jealousy and rivalry among “friends,” which I always find interesting. I guess it was realistic, but what was the message here? Tara’s experience was sort of awful, but not really that awful, as it is for a lot of, even most?, girls. I guess I was too dense to get that Tara’s “consent” wasn’t really consent. (See Jessica Kiang’s review below.) It’s complicated for sure. I thought the girls were all 18 years old, not 16 … the actresses were all in their 20s anyway.
It’s a W.D. By movie … “Molly Manning Walker” looks like a gay Millennial trust fund kid, but who knows. There was a homosexual relationship casually thrown in, which is a very Millennial thing to do.
From Jessica Kiang’s excellent review: “‘How to Have Sex’ is a different kind of Greek tragedy — no grand myth, just a heart-sore, everyday observation of what the world does to girls and what the world makes girls do to themselves.”
