There were two scenes in Molly Manning Walker’s directorial debut How to Have Sex (which, as of this week, is streaming on Mubi) that I had to watch through my fingers. The first features Mia McKenna-Bruce’s character, Tara—a British teenage girl who rocks up to the Greek party island of Malia with her best friends, Em and Skye, for a wild end-of-term holiday—on the beach with Paddy, the cute, inscrutable roommate of the hotel neighbor Tara had originally been crushing on. It’s late at night, and when Paddy initiates sex, Tara doesn’t quite say no, but her face throughout the encounter looks more akin to someone receiving an invasive gynecological exam than someone having consensual, actively desired sex.
The beach scene is painful to watch, certainly, but if I’d seen it when I was Tara’s age or close to it, I likely wouldn’t have registered that anything was supposed to be amiss. Booze-fueled, passion-free hookups were the name of the game for me and all my friends in college. It took until long after graduation for me to develop enough sensitivity around the issue of sexual assault (or, more to the point, enough awareness to realize the shared DNA between what happened to Tara and what I thought of as normal sex) to begin wincing when I saw graphic depictions of rape or sexual misconduct onscreen.
There’s no shortage of this kind of content in film and TV history, from the Tarantino oeuvre to The Sopranos all the way to Game of Thrones, and while I don’t think sexual assault should be automatically off-limits, I do wish films like How to Have Sex—in which sexual assault is used onscreen to tell a specific, singular and necessary story, one that actually revolves around the emotional development of the character experiencing the assault—were more broadly considered to be the norm. “What could be a typical, cut-and-dry look at sexual assault is instead a nuanced, zoomed-out portrait of how many factors, like peer pressure and FOMO, can create an environment—and in a larger scope, a culture—where assault becomes common,” Kerensa Cadenas wrote about How to Have Sex. While watching Tara is acutely painful, it’s also done artfully enough to feel meaningful. (One particular shot of Tara walking down a garbage-strewn street in the light of day, still dressed in her neon green party-girl ensemble, is difficult to forget.)
The second scene I had to watch through my fingers in How to Have Sex might look, to some, like a more quote-unquote real instance of sexual assault, but in fact it doesn’t feel entirely separable from the beach scene. In it, Paddy—who, at this point, clearly feels entitled to sex with Tara—assaults her while she’s sleeping, shortly before two of their friends walk in and jump into the bed, seeking sleepy relief from their hangovers. Watching McKenna-Bruce’s face toggle between shock, anger, pain, and a forced veneer of calm is genuinely astounding (and cements the notion of the actor as the film’s biggest breakout), but it’s easy to imagine a less-gifted filmmaker than Walker truncating the onscreen moment to save the viewer discomfort. Discomfort, though, is the least of what survivors of sexual assault have to endure from a society that has kind of grotesque curiosity about the horror and gore of their trauma but not the shame and guilt that’s so often a part of the healing process. Who are we, in the end, to turn away from Tara’s pain?
McKenna-Bruce has described the filming of How to Have Sex as an extremely positive experience, telling Vogue’s Lisa Wong Macabasco in February that the cast worked with an intimacy coordinator: “The sex scenes were choreographed, so they were as easy as could possibly be. They were the only scenes throughout the whole film where we knew exactly what we were doing.” Much of the film is an ode to the mess that young people reliably make—the transformation of a gleaming hotel room into a pit of cast-off bikini tops, empty booze cups, and sunscreen bottles, for example. But careful planning went into the scenes that were the most challenging, it seems.
How exactly do films like How to Have Sex craft a work of art that is faithful to the problems with sexual assault while respecting and honoring those involved in the making? “I always talk to each of the actors individually first so that they have the space to tell me anything that they might not be comfortable with, whether it’s supposed to be traumatic within the story or not,” says Austin-based intimacy coordinator Kathryn Bailey. “This is where the idea of consent is different in film versus real life. While the latter is supposed to be an enthusiastic yes, when it comes to film, the consent is regarding whether this actor is making fully informed, autonomous decisions on how they portray the scene. There’s an acronym for consent that Planned Parenthood uses (FRIES, or “freely given, reversible, informed, enthusiastic, and specific”), but intimacy professionals have adopted CRISP: considered, reversible, informed, specific, and participatory.”
It’s the reversible part of this acronym that I keep coming back to when I think about the scene of Tara and Paddy on the beach. I wish desperately that we, as a society, taught girls like Tara that it’s okay to say yes and then say no or to say nothing at all and still have your nonverbal cues count. But in film and life, it’s still more common to see young women acquiesce to sex they don’t quite want than to see them empowered to rebuff it. For that matter, how far have we really gotten in empowering young actors to rebuff unwanted or inappropriate treatment on set? It was only a decade ago that Blue Is the Warmest Color’s two young female stars were forced to contend with what they referred to as “horrible,” abusive behavior from the film’s male director.
Ultimately, it wasn’t either of the nonconsensual sex scenes from How to Have Sex that lingered in my mind long after I walked out of the theater. Instead, it was a sequence from the start of the film, when Tara, Skye, and Em lurch home from the Malia clubs on a first, “unsuccessful” (a.k.a. non-hookup-defined) night out; they fall down, tease each other, soothe each other, make wild promises, and swallow fistfuls of french fries. Tara, Skye, and Em are trying so hard to be adults, but any real adult can see it at once; they’re babies, all three of them, just like my friends and I were when we first started staggering out of clubs and bars in our late teens and early 20s, desperate for a story to give our night a shape.
I wish I’d known back then that the evenings I dismissed as failures because I didn’t go home with anyone—the evenings I spent instead with my best friends, laughing and roasting each other and eating late-night drunk food—would be the ones I’d actually remember with the greatest fondness. I wouldn’t have listened back then if a kindly adult had told me this, though, and to my mind neither would Tara, Skye, and Em. They need to make their own mistakes, just like every young person before and after them, and while it’s painful to see them flounder and fail and be hurt by men who aren’t worthy of them, it’s also beautiful to imagine some hungover, regretful, eyeliner-streaked teenage girl (like the one I used to be) watching them onscreen and feeling less alone.
