Spring Breakers is
a film that has its cake and eats it too. It’s a turbulent high/low collision,
an art house exploitation film and moody mainstream wallow. It springs from the
head of Harmony Korine, a once-precocious filmmaker who has made a career out of
creating films that serve as thumbs in the eyes of both propriety and audiences
in detestable artfully artless small-scale grime like Gummo and Trash Humpers. (The outlier is the sweetly, emptily bizarre Mister Lonely.) What’s left to do once you’ve so thoroughly cultivated a niche aura of punk
unpredictability? His new film is a stab towards something like mainstream
disreputability with a topsy-turvy R-rated update of the squeaky clean 1950s
teen beach movies that’s been driven off the surf and into a neon beach out of
a Michael Mann film, a feature-length montage overlaid with Malickian voice
over and a non-stop dubstep and hip-hop soundtrack (Skrillex wrote the music
with composer Cliff Martinez). It’s a film that sends its characters straight
into a horrifying bacchanalia and keeps pushing until it finds the even more
horrifying criminality simmering permanently underneath. It’s ugly, volatile,
occasionally offensive, largely troubling, and always mesmerizing. What a trip.
It all starts at an unspecified any-college, where whomping
bass seeps out of carousing frat house gatherings and bored youths stare
vacantly at their history professor, the darkened classroom a sea of glowing
laptop screens. We first meet Faith (Selena Gomez) at a campus church group.
Afterwards, one of the other young congregants (Glee’s Heather Morris) asks Faith if, for Spring Break, she still
plans on going to Flordia with a group of rowdier girls. “I’ve known them since
Kindergarten,” Faith says, summoning a kind of protective innocence. (Her
friend’s advice? Pray.) Everything will be fine, Faith thinks. It’s all going
to be fun. But, with her religiousness and her name being clear thematic
markers, what she’s really in for is a trip to a metaphoric Hell above and
beyond the collegiate partying she’s witnessed. She’s also not aware that, with
money tight, her travelling companions (Ashley Benson, Vanessa Hudgens, and
Rachel Korine) have just raised the money necessary for their travel by robbing
a diner armed with squirt guns and a sledgehammer.
That this information, when revealed, isn’t an immediate red
flag to Faith is a little disconcerting, but away the young women go, itching
for adventure, St. Petersburg bound. Once there, they find themselves in the
middle of the prolonged beachside riot of drugs, alcohol, and young bodies in slippery
swimsuits that is Spring Break in certain areas of the nation’s warmer climes. Korine
films it all so closely and lovingly that I felt the need for a new word, one
that would go above and beyond “ogle.” The way his camera lunges towards and
lingers on extras, but especially at his constantly skimpily attired stars, is
about as subtle as a cartoon “ahoogah!” Numerous scenes of youthful people engaging
in varied, energetic, and dangerous activities immediately follow. Now, I don’t
think I’m being a premature fuddy-duddy to say that this kind of partying seems
to have nothing to do with fun. It’s an endurance test of ingesting the most
mind-altering, mood-scrambling substances, damaging property, staying out in
the sun all day and risking severe bodily harm all night. Inevitably, I
suppose, the girls end up in jail when a party they’ve stumbled into gets
broken up. Standing in the courtroom for sentencing – pay a fine or spend two
days in the slammer – wearing only their Day-Glo bikinis, the judge takes one look
at them and asks “spring breakers?” knowing full well the answer. He must see a
lot of them this time of year.
The girls are unexpectedly bailed out. Alien, a creepy
low-level, drug-dealing, wannabe rapper who gazes out at them from over dark
sunglasses with a smile so wide they can admire his grill, pays their fines in
full. Played by James Franco in spectacularly ratty cornrows, this self-styled
gangster brags about wanting to “do bad,” not wanting to “do good,” shows off
his guns and knives, lets them try his weed, and makes sure to put in a plug
for his music which he proudly says can be heard on YouTube. He oozes a sense
of danger and razor’s-edge impulsiveness that informs the rest of the film as
the college girls (all at first, but as some return home, their number grows
smaller and tougher) get slowly pulled into the local underground scene of drug
dealers, thieves, and club owners that feeds parasitically off the marginally
more reputable waves of spring breakers that annually flood the city. Let’s
just say that the guns at play are squirt guns no more. That in this final
narrative descent, Franco’s rival, played by Gucci Mane, is the only black
character to have any lines and is here only to create a clear villain (or something close to it) is ugly,
an example of the film’s occasionally offensive jumble.
But, troubling though it is, Korine’s film is both ugly and
sublime, sometimes at once, as in a string of shakedowns shot in slow motion
and accompanied by only the sound of Britney Spears’s ballad “Everytime.” (Earlier,
the girls goofily sang “…Baby One More Time” to each other, though the Britney
songs that you’d think would be most apt to the proceedings – “Oops! I Did It
Again” and “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Women” – go unheard.) It’s hard to parse
if the film is reveling in the teasing debauchery or drawing a stark lesson in
its inevitable descent into greater and greater criminality. Is it a film of instant-gratification nihilism or stylish hedonism? Is it aghast or roused by the behavior on display? Is it corrosive or celebratory? I
choose all of the above. It’s at once objectified youth culture hothouse and giddy satirical
denouncement. Is Korine creating a millennial Gatsby party or participating in the emptiness of it all? (A key may be the fate of Faith.) It’s often hard
to tell with a movie so close to an embodiment of the subject at hand if we’re
experiencing a work of understanding or scorn or both at once. My verdict was prone to shifting mid-scene. Either way, it’s artful trash
that’s far from Korine’s usual overthought sloppiness; it comes by its loose
sliminess, its casual beauty, and its most offensive qualities quite honestly. In fact, one might
call it a trash-terpiece.
No comments:
Post a Comment