'How to Have Sex': Molly Manning Walker exposes harsh reality of how we've learned about, taught consent

Set with among horny, drunk, partying teenagers on a holiday, Molly Manning Walker's award-winning film How to Have Sex (now in theatres), starring Mia McKenna-Bruce, directly faces our inability to effectively talk about consent.

Three 16-year-old British girls, Tara (McKenna-Bruce), Skye (Lara Peake) and Em (Enva Lewis) are ready for a seriously fun holiday in Malia, Crete, with the bubbling high-energy group starting the trip off my talking themselves into a better hotel room.

They end up meeting a group of boys, including Badger (Shaun Thomas) and Paddy (Samuel Bottomley), but it's Badger who catches Tara's eye, exchanging glances and smiles from across their balconies.

Drinking, partying and engaging in particularly sexually-charged activities, there's lots of talk about who's going to have sex, and specifically the most sex, on this trip.

For Tara, the question is whether she'll lose her virginity, but one night on the beach results in Tara having an experience she wasn't anticipating.

'We're all responsible for ... teaching teenagers how to have sex properly'

In How to Have Sex, the pressure Tara feels to have sex comes from a number of different places, the boys she meets on this holiday, but also her friends, and even more broadly at all these clubs and events she's going to on this holiday.

"Often we've pointed fingers at people," Walker told Yahoo Canada. "I think the only way to move the conversation is to talk about as a societal issue, and how we're all responsible for change and teaching teenagers how to have sex properly, and talking about female pleasure. Just culturally shifting the conversation around it."

McKenna-Bruce's performance as Tara is impressive, with the actor being able to give a glimpse into what Tara is thinking, but not saying out loud, even with just one look, or a slight gesture. It's what really gives this film a sensitivity and an honesty, even among these high-energy, vibrant Malia party scenes. At the core of this storytelling is in fact Tara's personal experience.

"We'd often talk about what was going on inside in each scene," Walker said about collaborating with McKenna-Bruce. "I think she has this amazing ability to act with her eyes and say so much, and I think that's really what the film is about, how we're all pretending and how to cover up what we're really feeling."

"We always wanted to feel it through her face and through her experience, and so the camera was always really close to her, and that maybe puts you in her world very tightly. But also, the music and the sound design is all really experiential, and I think sound plays a huge part in that. ... The kind of task given to all heads of department was to focus on realism, and really capturing that world. So whether it be going into real hotel rooms and photographing the mess, ... the costume designer came to Malia with me ... and was photographing real people in the street."

The harsh reality of our understanding of consent

In order to really understand what teens have learned about sex, a workshop was conducted for this film. Young people up to the age of 21 were asked about their thoughts on sex and consent, and the result proved why a film like How to Have Sex, but specifically Walker's approach to those elements of the story, is important.

"There was one girl in particular that stood up in one of those workshops and was like, 'Girls, they have to get less drunk, of course they're going to get assaulted if they like wear short skirts and get drunk,'" Walker recalled. "We were like, woah, that's really quite a harsh thing to say."

"I think that pressure and responsibility that she felt so strongly to enforce on other girls was integrated into the project."

Overall, Walker believes that our approach to discussing consent is "way too binary," with a focus on the word "no" and "yes."

"We're obsessed with yes and no and I think if you were talking to someone and suddenly someone went really internal and like froze, you wouldn't carry on talking, you'd be like, 'OK what was going on?' Walker said. "And so I think for some reason, in sex, we've sort of forgotten social construct, understanding of human beings."

As you may expect, without giving too much away about the film, How to Have Sex ends with Tara and her friends flying home from their vacation. But in terms of what Walker wanted to leave the audience with in the final moments of the film, she wanted to "redefine what people think of as victims."

"I think often in films, someone's sexually assaulted and then their life is ruined forever," Walker said. "They can't move on from it."

"I think what we have established releasing this film is that most women have experienced sexual assault, and so they carry this with them. So don't judge a book by its cover. The loud, bubbly girls, going into rooms and super full of energy, have also experienced this."