In his short, Good Thanks, You? (2020), Molly Manning Walker (London, 30 years old) exposed how authorities retraumatized victims who reported sexual abuse. After years as a cinematographer (from photographing the music video Sundress, from A$AP Rocky to his latest work in the recent premiere Scrapper, directed by her friend and generation partner Charlotte Regan) jumped into the direction to exorcise her own pain. At 16, she herself was a victim of sexual assault and the way she was treated when she reported it prolonged her pain. “Directing that short was the most expensive way to get therapy,” she said during her first visit to the Cannes Film Festival. Three years later, last May she returned to the French competition to present her debut film, How To Have Sex, where it won the prize in the Un Certain Regard section.
In this film, which will hit Spanish theaters on March 15, Walker continues to delve deeper into the abuse, but going to the beginning of the problem, to the lack of sexual education among young people that directly impacts the basic concept of consent. “The film revolves around the coming of age, but focuses on how we learn to have sex through the pressure of friendships, toxic masculinity and social expectations,” he explains. How To Have Sex It follows three friends who go on a trip to Malia (Greece) at the end of the school year. Only one of them, Tara, still carries the label of being a virgin and the attempt to get rid of that weight at all costs is the narrative thread. Malia is one of those destinations of debauchery that the director captures naturally, excited, maddening, with little clothing, a lot of alcohol and neon lights. She did not go there in her youth, but she did spend more than one summer in Magaluf, where she got many of the ideas that she has captured on screen. Fellatios on a stage in front of hundreds of people, drunk day and night, hypersexualization… And little real conversation about what they were experiencing because nothing could spoil the best vacation of their lives. The director says that, after an injury, she changed her childhood obsession with soccer for alcohol and partying in her adolescence. And then, overnight, she redirected all that addictive energy into movies. After the award at Cannes, the British press has raised her as a voice at the forefront of a new generation of female filmmakers eager to change and update a conversation that always fell on the same side.
Let's start with the title, why did you decide to make it that way?
Very simple, if you said it in the negative, How not to have sex You would quickly understand what was going to happen. Plus, these girls think all the time about how to have sex and I think that's the saddest thing of all.
The anxiety and rush to lose your virginity.
It is something very sad. It's very crazy as a concept, we're just trying to get it out of the way. There is so much taboo around female pleasure, about good sex for women. The trend is “do it and that's it, let's not talk about it.” But we should talk about it, about how we feel, how it should happen. Most women I know have experienced some type of sexual abuse and we need to talk about it. I made this film in the hope that the world will change, that it will open a new conversation about consent. I hope we start talking more about positive sexual experiences.
The film is based on your own experience, why did you use that specific vacation as a starting point?
It was on one of those trips that I began to reflect on everything that was wrong in our way of understanding sex, in what we were talking about before about the pressure of getting rid of virginity without talking about female sexual pleasure, about good sex for the women. I was in one of those clubs where sex is present in a very aggressive and very negative way, I experienced that pressure that Tara feels. Everything comes from real experiences that I have been told or have lived. Furthermore, from 16 to 18 years old is a key period, it is that moment when they ask you to decide who you are, you are still a virgin, you are taking your exams, your group of friends will divide, change… It is the end of a was. We are a very vulnerable pressure cooker.
Do you think that after MeToo Do we read differently what we have done or suffered in the past?
I don't know, I think now they question what's happening sooner and faster. As happens to the character of Tara. And I'm very interested in Skye's character, she hasn't had good sexual experiences in the past either, but she has convinced herself that they were good. There are many young women like her, who hide insecurity while pushing the rest of the girls in that same direction.
There is a lack of tools and conversation to understand consent.
It's not black or white. If two people are having relationships, but one realizes that they are not having a good time and wants to stop, as decent human beings they stop and there are no problems. You should understand the feelings of others. That's the conversation we should be having. I didn't want to put too many drugs in the movie, nor do we make men villains… But I hope you understand women better after watching it.
The healthiest relationship presented in the film is the one between two women.
It was important to me, because I think that's what's changed recently. This new generation has accepted and sees this dimension as normal. And to be honest, I didn't really know how to have sex until I had gay relationships.
He also decided not to dwell on the violent moments.
Watching rape scenes is unnecessary and uncomfortable for women who have experienced it, we don't need to retraumatize ourselves, that's why I show it all through Tara's face.
What do you think that the presence of intimacy coordinators is it becoming generalized?
I can't believe it didn't exist before, nor that they still sometimes refuse to include it. Having a safe shoot was the absolute priority in my film, I know many actresses who have had a very bad time and have left a set traumatized.
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