‘How to Have Sex’ Review: This Paradise Is Nothing but Trouble

For all the hard-partying and forced euphoria onscreen, the movie “How to Have Sex” proves grim going. A vaporous coming-of-age story, it tracks Tara (a fine, sympathetic Mia McKenna-Bruce), who plays a 16-year-old British girl on a brief, booze-soaked getaway in Greece. There, amid crowds of other like-minded vacationers, she hangs with friends and strangers, hits the clubs, scarfs fast food, drinks and drinks some more, tossing back endless shots until she staggers into oblivion, only to rouse herself for another round of the same.

Tara and her supposed besties — Enva Lewis as the nice Em, Lara Peake as the not-so-nice Skye — have arrived in Malia, a resort town in Crete, fresh from their crucial secondary-school exams. They’ve come for a fly, flop and fornicate holiday, one of those excursions with sandy beaches, cheap hotels, nonstop beats and crowds of fit people who look and talk just like them. Giddy and super-stoked, the girls have come equipped with suitcases of beachwear, tubs of makeup and apparently superhuman livers. Tara is also hoping to lose her virginity, a familiar rite of passage that here turns into a blurry life lesson.

The writer-director Molly Manning Walker eases you in with shrieks and laughs, hovering camerawork and naturalistic scenes. Walker is a cinematographer making her feature directing debut and she’s keenly sensitive to the power of color; she uses a wide spectrum to set (and change) the mood, signify interiority and telegraph ideas. (The director of photography is Nicolas Canniccioni.) Kids being kids and often drunk — and because Manning Walker is loath to put words in their mouths — the characters rarely express themselves coherently. Instead, as the story unfolds, she plays with the palette, the inaugural velvety blue giving way to the sun’s white glare, blasts of Day-Glo green and washes of red.

The story begins taking shape once the girls meet three other young British tourists, including a guy named Badger (Shaun Thomas). From their nearby, amusingly portentous balconies, Tara and Badger trade shy looks and soon the two groups have joined forces. Complications ensue along with more rounds of clubbing and boozing and vomiting. Em pairs off with Paige (Laura Ambler), but Skye isn’t taken with the other circle’s third member, Paddy (Samuel Bottomley). Instead, she keeps checking out Badger, an affable doe-eyed guy with a seemingly incongruent lipstick print tattooed on his neck right above the words “hot legends.”