The Coming-of-Age Movie Gets Another Makeover with ‘How to Have Sex’ and ‘Scrambled’

Coming-of-age movies were dominated by boys for so long that it still feels like an indie-movie event to get two such movies made by and about women opening on the same day. On the surface, those two movies — How to Have Sex and Scrambled, opening theatrically this weekend — aren’t especially similar, apart from including female characters who compulsively and half-ironically call each other “legends” in moments of quasi-solidarity. They’re not even about the coming of the same ages, with How to Have Sex about a teenage girl on spring break looking to lose her virginity and Scrambled about a 34-year-old woman looking to freeze her eggs. But their strengths and limitations make for a revealing double feature.

How to Have Sex occupies more traditional coming-of-age territory, though it’s still boundary-pushing compared to what might have been made from this material a decade or two earlier. Written and directed by Molly Manning Walker, the film follows a trio of English girls on a debauched spring-break-style holiday in Greece, as the three friends prepare for an uncertain future. Em (Enva Lewis) is on the path to university in the fall, but the exam-determined fates of Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce) and Skye (Lara Peake) appear to be up in the air, creating an unspoken tension between the two of them, masked with girl-bonding joshing. Tara is also the virgin of the group, and the movie largely adopts her point of view as the trio flirts with some boys they meet at their hotel, as Em and especially Skye nudge Tara toward her first time. The haze of drunken partying is good for the nudging, but perhaps less so for the sex itself. Tara winds up exploring the thin, dangerous line between drunken hookups and actual consent, between a coerced “yeah” in the heat of the moment and near-instant regret. (Though a later, even more upsetting scene is not so ambiguous.)

This might sound like British kitchen-sink miserabilism, and it certainly has a certain grubby, downcast immediacy. But Walker has a keen eye for the moments of unexpected youthful ecstasy that might keep a teenager coming back to the party, rather than simply fleeing in despair. At one point, in the aftermath of a disappointing encounter, Tara joins up with a new group of friends she meets at the club. We brace for more pain, or at least some casual cruelty to drive home her loneliness. Instead, the new folks treat her with kindness, she gets out of her head for a little bit, and manages to achieve some manner of blissful escape – albeit one that eventually looks fleeting and unable to keep her other feelings at bay.

The movie whipsaws back to heartbreak in later scenes where Tara, beautifully played by McKenna-Bruce, essentially tries to tell friends about her bad experience with her eyes, the words lodged uncomfortably in her throat as they prod her for juicy details. As the vacation winds down, viewers may feel a pull to board the plane with the girls, just to see these characters outside the sphere of trashed-hotel, half-dressed debauchery – to see more of their lives as people, rather than bodies and minds subject to abuse. As is, the movie’s open-endedness manages to feel a little pat, even though its pushing forward is both consistent with the overall arc and, probably, realistic. Sometimes How to Have Sex feels torn between depicting a series of experiences and issuing a series of dire warnings – a sign of how understandably fraught this material can be now that consent, sexual assault, and related issues are discussed more openly.

Further down the line in supposed maturity, Scrambled also feels torn – appropriately so – between destigmatizing its heroine’s behavior and wanting better for her. Leah McKendrick writes, directs, and stars as Nellie, a Los Angeles woman whose irreverent wit, high-but-flagging spirits, and seemingly arrested development are all reminiscent of characters from Obvious Child, Frances Ha, Bridesmaids, and other lady-driven answers to Apatow-style late-breaking-maturity comedies. This material tends to be rom-com-adjacent, and one of the best things about Scrambled is how frequently and insistently it resists the temptation to go there: to spring a twist where the woman who freezes her eggs out of ambivalence toward her own child-free-single ambivalence ironically meets Mr. Right (or gets pregnant by Mr. Maybe).

Instead, McKendrick really does follow through with focusing on the difficulties of the egg-freezing decision and ensuing medical process, as well as Nellie’s feelings of isolation and uncertainty about the future. The movie understands how it’s the latter that fuels so many coming-of-age stories, even if the actual age at hand involves engagement parties and birth announcements rather than spring-break shindigs. McKendrick, who based the movie on some of her own experiences, nails the overcurated aesthetics of the Instagram-poisoned social occasion, right down to the detail of every baby name reaching try-hard absurdity. In front of the camera, she’s an expressive comic actor, her face oscillating from Joker-ish grin to ostentatious grimace – the subtly childlike touch of someone unable to conceal their emotions, adrift in a world that often seems determined to ignore her anyway.

As with How to Have Sex, there’s a faint strain of probably-unintentional conservativism running through the movie’s treatment of sexuality, which is boldly depicted but ultimately looks like a dead end, considering how infrequently it actually provides the pleasure Nellie is presumably prowling for. And unlike How to Have Sex, a little grown-woman solipsism creeps in, as McKendrick gives herself not one but two emotionally loaded monologues to strangers that detail how she’s Going Through It, and treats some withheld (but not especially earth-shattering) exposition about her most recent breakup as a borderline tragic backstory. After those early-2010s revelations in the field of messily funny women-children, Scrambled feels a little self-conscious about the love letter Nellie must ultimately write to herself, not least because her eventual conclusion sounds suspiciously (and, sadly, non-satirically) like an Insta caption.

“Maybe it’s time that coming-of-age movies become even more unmoored from the already-vague boundaries of adolescence.”

Then again, why shouldn’t all the decisions that could lead into eventually having kids get equal time with the kids themselves? Maybe it’s time that coming-of-age movies become even more unmoored from the already-vague boundaries of adolescence. Though they deal with completely different generations, separated by nearly two decades, How to Have Sex and Scrambled both situate themselves in a decidedly post-millennial understanding of growing up, something that has given female-driven coming-of-age stories some extra bite: Namely that the process refuses to finish, and can only be refined and redefined along the way.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.