Directed by: Harmony Korine.
Written by: Harmony Korine.
Starring: Selena Gomez (Faith), Vanessa Hudgens (Candy), Ashley Benson (Brit), Rachel Korine (Cotty), James Franco (Alien), Gucci Mane (Archie), Heather Morris (Bess).
The key line in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers
is spoken early - “Just pretend like
it’s a video game. Just act like it’s a motherfucking movie”. The line is used
by one girl to another just before they rob the chicken shack in order to fund
their Spring Break in St. Petersburg Florida. What follows directly after that
line is undoubtedly the greatest single shot of 2013 so far, and the best
Korine has ever put on film – as two girls go in the back door of the Chicken
Shack, a third drives slowly around the building to pick them up on the other
side. We see the robbery framed through the windows of the restaurant – in
effect, becoming a movie within the movie. It’s also telling which of the two
girls go into the Chicken Shack, which one watches the movie within the movie,
and which one is entirely absent from the event – it helps to explain why they
do what they do later in the movie. But why “Just pretend it’s a video game.
Just act like it’s a motherfucking movie” is the key line in Spring Breakers is
simple – practically every character will act like it’s a “motherfucking movie”
for the entirety of Spring Breakers running time. Not just the four girls at
the heart of the movie, and not just Alien (James Franco), the white,
cornrowed, blinged out, grill wearing rapper/drug dealer they meet, but
everyone. The first shots of the movie show us scenes from spring break, with a
variety of young, hot women in various stages of undress, gyrating on men as
they pour alcohol all over their bodies. It’s just a slightly more explicit
music video Korine is making at the beginning – and he’ll return to the images
throughout the movie. Whether it’s a video game, movie, or music video,
everyone in Spring Breakers is taking their cue from some sort of pop culture
item. Because that’s the way you’re supposed to act on spring break, right?
Spring Breakers is a deliberate provocation from
Harmony Korine, who has spent his entire career provoking strong reactions from
audiences. Up until now, he’s been content making his provocations in the
indie-art world in films like Gummo (1997), julien-donkey boy (1999), Mister
Lonely (2007) and Trash Humpers (2009). But with Spring Breakers, he has broken
through into the mainstream – deliberately. He casts a movie star like James
Franco, Disney Princesses Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens, and one of the
Pretty Little Liars – Ashley Bensen. As many have pointed out, thematically,
Spring Breakers isn’t all that different from his last film – the deliberately
ugly Trash Humpers, a movie I hated – thinking the film was boring and
repetitive in the extreme, even while I admired Korine for making exactly the
film he wanted to make. In Spring Breakers, he makes some similar points, but
has found a way to do so in a much more entertaining and satisfying movie. I
was bored by Trash Humpers, because it was in essence the same thing in scene
after scene. In Spring Breakers, I was transfixed – I couldn’t take my eyes off
the screen. As soon as it ended, I wanted to see it again.
The movie stars Selena Gomez as Faith – who we
first meet in a prayer group at the University she goes to. She is, in essence,
a good girl, who gets a thrill hanging out with the bad girls – and pretending
to be one sometimes. Her friends are Candy (Hudgens) and Brit (Bensen), who we
first meet in class – ignoring a lecture on the Civil Rights movement, while
one writes on her notepad “I want penis”, and the other draws a penis and
pretends to suck it. The subject of the lecture is no coincidence – throughout
the movie, the largely white characters will adopt much of African American
culture, without knowing the history behind it. They remain deliberately
ignorant of it. Their fourth friend is Cotty (Rachel Korine), who exists
somewhere between Faith and Candy/Brit.
Everyone is going on spring break, and the girls
plan on going to – but don’t have enough money. Hence the robbery of the
Chicken Shack. The four girls then go to St. Petersburg, and much of the first
half of the movie seems like one wild party – something akin to last year’s
Project X – as it is a non-stop orgy of drinking, drugs and excess. Then the
four girls wind up in jail. And the only person willing to bail them out is
Alien (Franco) – who sees them there, and decides to take them under his wing
so to speak. And quickly, things spin completely out of control.
Alien is the most fascinating character in the
film, and is easily the best performance of James Franco’s career. There is
something undeniably creepy about him from his first scene – and the scene
where he attempts to seduce Selena Gomez was, for me anyway, the most
disturbing scene in the entire movie (especially his closing line – “If you
want to go home, go home. But your friends are staying. And when I’m with them,
I’ll be thinking about you”). The scene is brilliant played by Franco – and
easily gets you to believe Gomez when she has said in interviews about this
film that Franco scared her when they were filming. Her reaction in this scene
is also wonderful – so scared are not, it was worth it. Franco is also
brilliant in a later scene, where he commands “Look at my stuff”. Scarface on
the TV on repeat. Guns, drugs and money galore. What’s the point of having it
all, if you cannot show it off.
The other key moments in Spring Breakers are a pair
of disturbing Britney Spears sing alongs. First, it’s the four girls by
themselves, drunk in a party lot singing Spears’ breakout hit – Hit Me Baby,
One More Time – which because of the video, which sexualized the then teenage
Spears to an almost obscene degree, made her a star. This moment kick starts a
disturbing re-enactment of the crime that funded their trip – this time, we’ll
loop around and see it from inside the restaurant – the terror of the employees
and customers real this time, and not so movie like. And later in the film,
Alien will sing with the three remaining girls a shockingly sincere version of
Spears’ “Everytime” – which really kick starts the orgy of violence that ends
the film.
Spring Breakers has already generate a fair degree
of controversy for the levels of sex and violence on display in the movie – and
how the movie both seems to be reveling in excess, and criticizing that same
excess. In how the movie seems to decry the sexualization of young women, while
also exploiting those same young women. All of this is somewhat true – Spring
Breakers is a movie full of contradictions. But how else do you want Korine to
address the issues? Whether we want to admit it or not, young female
celebrities like Gomez, Hudgens and Benson have already been sexualized by our
society. These are smart young women, who are using Korine to help break out of
the image people have of them, while Korine uses them to up the kink and
controversy factor. Gomez’s image really shouldn’t be affected by Spring
Breakers - she remains an innocent in the movie, even if she dons a bikini,
drinks a few beers and –shock! – smokes a cigarette. Perhaps because she’s a
few years farther away from her own Disney franchise – High School Musical –
Hudgens seems more willing to smash her good girl image here – she has two of
the more shocking scenes in the movie – the first when she and Bensen turn the
tables on Franco with his guns, and then of course, the over the top violent
climax. While it is true that none of the girls are really fully formed
characters, I think that’s by design, and isn’t really a flaw in the movie.
They are all – actresses and characters – essentially good girls playing bad –
it’s just a matter of what each consider too far – if anything.
Korine isn’t interested in moralizing in Spring Breakers.
He throws everything at the screen to try and provoke a response from the
audience. Yes, the film can be said to be contradictory, but again, I think
that’s by design. Perhaps at 40, Korine is getting too old to simply try and
shock the audience – to be an enfant terrible if you will. But Spring Breakers
is strangely a maturation for him. Easily the best film Korine has ever done,
it is the type of film I have been expecting him to make for 15 years now. Korine has once again made precisely the film
he wanted to make – something that I have said about every one of previous
films, even when I hated them. This time though, he’s made a film people (or at
least me) actually want to watch. Spring Breakers is one of the most
fascinating, interesting, shocking, disturbing films of the year so far. I
can’t wait to see the film again – and to see what Korine has in store for his
next film.
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