How to Have Sex ( Molly Manning Walker’s full-length debut, and surely one of the year’s best) has its obvious germ on Walker’s previous short, Good Thanks, You? Same situation, condensed to the observational basics: After a night of partying goes miserably wrong, our heroine, Amy (an excellent Jasmine Jobson), shows up at the house of her boyfriend, Lewis (Micheal Ward). Amy seems sullen even as Lewis joyfully plays his soccer video game (Real Madrid wins!). The girl is hiding, and processing, something that can not be easily expressed. The boyfriend knows something is wrong when she doesn’t reply to his caresses with the usual ardor. He can only assume she’s cheated on him during her “girl’s night out.” The dialogue is minimal, the silence painful.
In a short, grueling, dizzying montage, Amy goes through the embarrassing legal grind that follows an accusation of sexual assault- the grind that makes so many rape victims say “Fuck it” and let most cases go unreported. A seemingly sympathetic caseworker asks:
“Let’s talk about clothing.”
Amy naively begins to describe her assailant’s outfit:
“He was wearing a black shirt, and-”.
The caseworker winces at this level of naivete, and “kindly” interrupts:
“No, Amy. YOUR clothing.”
That’s what’s at stake in the system. “Tell us what whorish outfit you were wearing, tell us how much you were begging for this horrible thing to happen.”
Walker’s close-ups allow her actors to successfully portray not their emotions, but rather the CONTAINING of their emotions. That’s the tension that makes this and How to Have Sex succeed: characters that could be histrionically devastated instead hold back. There is an excellent interview with the late Martin Landau where he explains his theory that the best actors don’t show their emotions: they HIDE them. Because that’s what people do in everyday life. Successful survival involves some degree of concealment. When most people ask: “How are you doing?” this should not be understood to mean: “How are you doing?” It means: “Don’t tell me how you’re doing.” They expect a grin and “Good Thanks, You?” Any other reply is an invitation to mutual discomfort.
HANSEL CASTRO'S HALLUCINA 