Shaun Thomas

How To Have Sex

31/01/24

Mubi

Molly Manning Walker’s debut film comes screeching onto the screen like, well, a trio of teenage girls. Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), Em (Enva Lewis) and Skye (Lara Peake) have just finished their GCSEs and now they’re in Malia, buoyant, excited and ready to cut loose. They’re looking at seven days of sheer, unadulterated hedonism. And, as Skye keeps reminding her, Tara needs to seize the opportunity to lose her virginity.

At its heart, How to Have Sex is about peer pressure. The holiday resort’s formulaic enforced ‘fun’ doesn’t leave much space for dissent, especially when you’re sixteen and desperate to fit in. The girls really enjoy their first night, getting drunk, doing bad karaoke and eating cheesy chips, but the following morning, hungover, Skye puts the kibosh on all that. “We’re not going to get laid if we stick together all the time,” she says.

And from then on, Tara stumbles, adrift.

McKenna-Bruce is perfectly cast as Tara: all big eyes and yearning, wanting to find her place in the world. Meanwhile, Peake deftly captures Skye’s insecurity-turned-meanness, while Lewis shines as the only one of the three who is at ease with herself: unlike her friends, she knows who she is and what she wants. She’s got the grades, the career plan – and she’s comfortable with her sexuality, enjoying her holiday fling with Paige (Laura Ambler), their next-door neighbour at the hotel.

Paige’s room-mates are Badger (Shaun Thomas) and Paddy (Samuel Bottomley). There’s an unmistakable spark of attraction between Tara and Badger, but they’re both quite shy and soft underneath their brash surfaces – and swept along by the pressure to conform. They’d clearly like to be together but instead, hyped up by a baying nightclub mob, he goes onstage for an unsatisfactory public blow job, while she endures a miserable first shag with Paddy.

Molly Manning Walker convincingly evokes the teenage experience, and I especially like Tara’s palpable sense of not fitting in, not being able to enjoy herself in the same way as the others appear to be doing. Despite its in-your-face appearance, the film is actually pretty nuanced, the emotional and social complexity acknowledged and explored.

My only bugbear is a petty one: why are they talking about “getting ten As” when GCSEs have been graded by number since 2019?

Nitpicks aside, How to Have Sex is a sweeter, more engaging and thought-provoking film than its name and cover-image might suggest. Much like its characters.

If, like us, you missed this movie’s fleeting cinema release, you’ll be pleased to know that you can now catch it on Mubi.

4 stars

Susan Singfield

Ali & Ava

16/03/22

Cineworld, Edinburgh

Clio Bernard is not exactly the most prolific of directors. Her last outing, Dark River, was released in 2017 – and we have to go all the way back to 2013 for The Selfish Giant. Her films are essentially evocations of working class life that might, initially, appear slight, but which are cleverly nuanced. Her characters are never allowed to be stereotypes; indeed, at times they are positively surprising.

Ali & Ava sits happily with her former endeavours: gentle, essentially heartwarming – but with hidden depths.

The setting is the multi-cultural hub of Bradford and, when we first meet Ali (Adeel Ahktar), he’s standing on the roof of his car, dancing to the techno-music blasting from his headphones. Ali is an affable fellow, a landlord of sorts,. He’s hyperactive (and probably somewhere on the autistic spectrum) and has a passion for listening to (and making) music. Meanwhile, he collects the various rents he’s owed, looks after his extended family and tries to come to terms with the fact that his wife, Runa (Ellora Torchia), after the death of their first child, has fallen out of love with him and is ready to move on with her life.

He has accepted this, but steadfastly refuses to announce the change to the rest of his family.

Ava (Claire Rushbrook) works as a teaching assistant at the local primary school. After the death of her Irish Catholic husband, she has devoted her life to her children and grandchildren. Her youngest son, Callum (Shaun Thomas), already a father himself, is still mourning the passing of the dad he idolised, even though his parents’ marriage was hardly a blissful union. Indeed, Ava chose to leave her husband because of his regular physical abuse of her.

Inevitably, Ali and Ava fall into each other’s orbits and, as their friendship deepens and blossoms into something more serious, so their lives become ever more difficult. Callum is immediately hostile to Ali, seeing him as an intruder, and it seems that everything the couple attempt together is subject to unsympathetic scrutiny from those around them.

In the midst of this hard-scrabble existence, Barnard manages to conjure moments of real beauty: fireworks blossoming silently above the rooftops of the city; children parading through the streets with coloured lights. There’s a joyful moment where Ali’s boundless enthusiasm manages to turn a potentially nasty situation into an uninhibited dance in the middle of a dodgy estate. Barnard draws intriguing comparisons between Ali in one of his music-fuelled trances and a little girl at the primary school, who is happy to clamber to the top of a climbing frame, but afraid to descend.

Ali & Ava isn’t exactly a blockbuster but, in its quiet, assured way, it’s worthy of attention – and further confirmation that Barnard is a director with a rare talent for realistic drama.

4 stars

Philip Caveney