Director: Harmony Korine
Writer: Harmony Korine
Starring: Ashley Benson, Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, Rachel Korine, James Franco
Release Date: March 5, 2013
Length: 1 hour 32 minutes
In 1994, Quentin Tarantino gave us what we can now look back on as the best movie to describe the phrase ‘WTF’. Pulp Fiction, with its original and wacky writing was the most surprising film ever. After walking out of my second screening at the Toronto International Film Festival this year though, Pulp Fiction will have to lose it’s WTF title to Harmony Korine’s disturbing and stupefying Spring Breakers. However, just because it shocks audiences doesn’t mean it amazes them.
Up until a month ago, Spring
Breakers seemed to me like the newest and most aggravating Disney project with
its headliners Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Benson. Throw in the name Harmony Korine
though, and we are dealing with a completely different film. Korine, best known
for writing the groundbreaking and controversial KIDS when he was nineteen years old, specifically chose the girls
with the screaming fan bases of twelve year olds, so that their innocent faces
would seem all the more shocking when doing what his script entailed.
The film opens with Skrillex
music blaring over ten minutes of topless kids on spring break. It shocks and
disturbs you in every way possible, and just when you think it’s enough, it
keeps going. As you will realize later though, those ten minutes set the tone
for the movie perfectly. From that moment on, nothing will shock you, just
intrigue you.
The plot, or what there is of it,
goes as follows. Four college girls, fed up with their dull small town lives,
rob a chicken joint to go on the most ecstasy filled blissful spring break ever
in Florida. When down there, they get pulled into the underground illegal world
of tourist-robbers and gangsters by the part time rapper, Dangerous (James
Franco with grills and dreadlocks). The story pretty much stops at the premise.
To some that might be a weakness, but to Korine, it was an advantage.
During the TIFF Q&A, Korine
stated he wanted to create a film without much dialogue and more like a sensory
experience. Audiences must know that when walking in. This is a music
video-like trance and does not follow any familiar formulas. Spring Breakers
benefits from being unlike any film you have seen before, but detriments from
the audience’s bewilderment when it is finished. It’s Scarface meets Britney
Spears and if you buy into what Korine is selling, you’re good to go. If not,
you can be assured to still notice the films artistic merit.
Aesthetically, Spring Breakers is
an incredible achievement. Korine’s cinematography is simply beautiful with
vibrant pinks and yellows to remind us of the sunny and dream-like feel of
Florida these girls are entranced by. The constant use of slow motion
establishes the high the characters are enjoying and maintains a consistent
pace throughout. Korine uses repetition of lines, shots and music to panic you during
the fall of that high when the film becomes more Scarface than Britney. The
editing is the most skillful medium of art in Spring Breakers, using
intercutting shots of the next scene to foreshadow a tone change in the story.
The combination of Skrillex’s
constant electronic beats with this surreal filmmaking results in cinematic
brilliance caught between being disturbingly bloody and hilariously pop-like.
The perfect example is when Spears’ “Everytime” plays over a robbery scene of
violence and machine guns. You simultaneously laugh and feel sick.
The acting only thrives on
Korine’s messed up atmosphere with doses and doses of weird improvisational
dialogue that will again either scare or amuse you. For example, James Franco
is guaranteed to have you howling with laughter, especially when he’s screaming
about the different stuff he owns. “Look at all my s***! I got shorts in every
colour!”.
It can always be argued that the
use of female nudity in films is sleazy and misogynistic, but Spring Breakers
isn’t like a horror movie, when the female victim just happens to have her top
off when she is alone. Korine’s minute long shot of a slo-mo bum shaking seems
to manifest his fascination with this grand number of kids who lose all senses
for a week or two in their version of paradise.
Despite all of Spring Breaker’s
graphic violence, nudity, use of drugs, alcohol, sex, etc, Korine uses no sense
of the term “shock value”. Instead, he entrances you so much that every time a
character goes further and further into their spring break activities, the
feeling is gradual and organic. By the time the movie has reached an ultimate
high of impropriety, you manage to somehow comfortably watch without a single
cringe.
That may not be true for everyone
but if you do get into it, you throw all caution to the wind and just enjoy.
That being said, Spring Breakers is most definitely not going to be everyone’s
cup of tea, to say the least, as no Harmony Korine film is. He repeatedly
states that he does not make movies for everyone to see, just for his specific
audience. If you fall under that audience, you will be pulled into the trance
and if not, you could easily sit there, offended by almost everything. Either
way, let us just hope people know what they are walking into come this film’s
release.
