Girls gone wildly wrong
Sex, violence wrapped in a thin shell of satire
Four pretty young women — two of them grown-up Disney stars whose appearance in and out of bikinis represents a kind of cultural perversion, as if Mickey Mouse were cast in a porn film — decide to leave their boring college town and go to Florida for spring break. They don’t have money, so they rob the local Chicken Shack, terrorizing customers with fake guns. They arrive to a bacchanal of beer, drugs, toplessness and the kind of aggressive sexual posing that make you think Dante could have set a whole new circle of hell at a motel pool in St. Petersburg.
Then they run into a drug dealer with real guns, and become embroiled in a violent gangsta war that’s just a small extension of an already-corrupt pose of anger, nihilism and booty-shaking.
This is Spring Breakers, Harmony Korine’s critique of the transgressive life of today’s youth, or perhaps simply Korine’s chance to drag his cinema of surreal oddity (Gummo, et al.) out of the art house and into the best-seller list on the coattails of a lot of jiggle. It’s difficult to tell in a movie that throws up a lot of ideas — some of them cribbed, it appears, from Oliver Stone’s Big Book of Hollywood Symbolism — and hopes they stick. It’s Natural Born Killers in a thong: Where the boyz are.
The film stars Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine as the college women. With the exception of Gomez’s character, Faith, a religious girl who becomes overwhelmed by the over-exuberant, over-throbbing, overwhelming non-stop party that is Florida in March, the rest are pretty well interchangeable. They’re played by former child stars (and one pretender: Korine is the director’s wife) tucked into skimpy two-piece bathing suits with instructions to grind their pelvises frequently and allow themselves to be bathed in beer.
The robbery and the arrival in Florida are accomplished quickly, despite a filmmaking style that draws the past into the future, pulling dialogue from one scene to the next and changing film styles from documentary-blurry to candy-coloured nipplevision. The robbery, for instance, is seen the first time from the restaurant’s drive-thru, the events witnessed through the window; it’s then repeated in close-up so we can see, with rising discomfort, the mood of violence (“You wanna die tonight?” they ask the customers, holding guns to their heads). It’s all orchestrated to the electro pulse of a technopop soundtrack that drags you relentlessly forward.
“It’s so nice to get a break from reality once in a while,” Faith says, a development illustrated with a lot of topless women sucking beer from hoses. But reality — street drug division — returns with the appearance of a new character, a smiling stranger with cornrows, metal teeth and a corn pone southern accent. His name is Alien (“I ain’t from this planet, y’all”) and he is played by James Franco, whose bland stumble through Oz the Great and Powerful might be attributable to the fact that he used up every scrap of personality here. Alien is clearly meant to be astonishing, and Franco attacks the part voraciously, gobbling up huge swaths of scenery with the apparent complicity of Harmony Korine, the man who made it so irresistibly edible.
At this point, Spring Breakers wanders into strange territory — Gidget meets Scarface — far from the beaches and the pool. However, Alien is also a would-be rap singer, and he intones “spring break” at various intervals to remind us where we are.
It’s difficult to know where that is, though. Spring Breakers is a provocative exaggeration that exposes a disharmonious culture — the sex, the violence, the (eventual) lack of Faith — without really saying anything about it. It is a parade of bare breasts, writhing bottoms and street gang exhibitionism, tied together with a Girls Gone Wild sensibility and made by a director looking for something resonant in the depraved rites of spring.