SPRING BREAKERS by Harmony Konne

Reviewed by Matt Micucci

 

Popular perception of spring break recalls a combination of college kids, topless girls, lots of drinking but most importantly, lots of sex. This is a combination that has been seen and exploited time and time again by cinema, and it's also Spring Breakers' ultimate hook. The gimmick here is the casting of Disney princesses Vanessa Hudgens and Justin Bieber's ex-girlfriend Selena Gomez as bad sex frenzied and gun crazy girls (though Gomez plays by far the most innocent girl out of the four).

 

Spring Breakers is a film about four college girls who want to get to Florida for Spring break, not only to have a good time but also to escape their suburban lifestyle and see something different. The trip, they hope, will lead them to a self discovery - but all it leads to is a rapid ascent to the life of crime, from robbing a diner high on coke and sporting balaclavas to getting involved in a drug dealer's gang war.

 

The film comes from the mind of Harmony Korine, in his fifth feature film as a director. Korine's most celebrated work, however, remains Kids which he did not direct but wrote. In Kids, Konne exposed so disturbingly the reality of the drugged up and sexed up high school boys and girls that in the end the lack of ethics in the film was almost too much to bear. Spring Breakers too could so easily have been shaped as an attack, a propaganda scare tactic aimed at parents to lock up their kids, but in the end it's more a lush piece of satire which starts off as a softcore porn and ends up being a gangster fantasy film with a videogame shoot-em-up ending.

 

Indeed, the film proves time and time again to be running on satire, with its use of Britney Spears music in key dramatic sequences, by matching pistols with My Little Pony balaclavas and with the inclusion of the character of Alien, played by James Franco, a drug dealer rapper who spends a lot of the time showing off the things he owns and the money he has (the line "look at my shit" is as liable to get stuck in one's head as any of today's cheesy radio hits). Making money for him is the ultimate drive, and it's something he shares with the girls for whom money works as the ultimate aphrodisiac - "money makes me so wet" says one of the girls early on in the film. The introduction of Alien leads the film to a plot, something it lacked for the better part of the first half hour, but it's nothing new and nothing special. A rivalry with another dealer and former best friend eventually arises, but the plot itself hardly matters at all.

 

Korine's approach, in fact, is very stylised - too stylised one would think for the audience that this film possibly hopes to attract. His cinematography and editing techniques recalls in a vulgar way Malick's latest work. Even on a narrative aspect, Spring Breakers could be seen as a modern day's equivalent of the suburban girl's outlaw romance fantasy portrayed in Malick's first film Badlands (though a far more decadent and far less appealing equivalent at that). The sharp switches of both the visual editing recall the disconnected unification of unrelated images of current pop videos, while the sound editing, with its endless repetition is a product of the digital era and YouTube video time skips. But behind the lush, colourful and cool imagery lies a dark and haunting movie; and the juxtaposition is almost unbearably disturbing, also because there seems to be no way out of it.

 

Easily the most haunting sequences are the ones where the girls put on goody goody voices in their phone calls to their mothers, telling them about what a great time they are having, what an enlightenment they are experiencing, how everyone they meet is very nice, and even more spine chillingly how they want to take them there with them next year. All the while, images of wild parties and orgies, drugs taking and drinking repeat in a seemingly endless succession. This, for a parent, must be close to the biggest nightmare ever portrayed on screen, what is most disturbing is that there is no evidence given that the girls do not mean what they say. Could this really be a modern youth's idea of life fulfilment? If so, what Korine really aims to achieve is the baring of all of today's youth culture credibility.

 

Spring Breakers is a sexy nightmarish vision. Alien's repeated line "springbreak...springbreak forever" is not a romantic chant but a frightening threat. Yet, Korine is still not keen on giving the film an ending, and not very keen on carrying a message - all things which ultimately make it seem pointless. The characters are all despicable, and there there never is a single charming moment. Sometimes, it feels as if this were the ultimate film representation of a radio pop song - meaningless, rude, cheesy, repetitive, loud, charmless but popular and easy on the eyes (the girls are in their bikinis for virtually the whole length of the film). Other times, however, it feels like an ultimate prank played by Korine on its audience - he gives them exactly what they wants, but be careful what you wish for...

 

USA/Canada/France, 2012

Directed by - Harmony Korine

Written by - Harmony Korine

Produced by - Chris Hanley, Jordan Gertner, David Zander, Charles-Marie Arthonioz

Director of Photography - Benoit Debie

Starring - James Franco, Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine

Rated 18s, 93m 35s