Harmony Korine’s garish, drunken dream, Spring Breakers, is part plodding psychedelic video-scape, part anarchic vision of American despair. It’s an out-of-balance story of four girl’s adventures in Florida, which begin badly and end brutally, as their lives – and Korine’s narrative – fumbles its way through a handful of discordant episodes united by the buzz of youthful splendor. That splendor is lathered onto the surface of Korine’s film in the form of slow motion panning shots of naked teenage breasts and beer-drenched fit boys who leap and bounce on the beaches and in the motels of Fort Lauderdale. It’s Terrance Malick meets a moody video fit for the dreamy music blog Gorilla vs. Bear. It’s heavenly and diabolic, euphoric and wasteful – but most of all, just a tad overblown.
Korine’s conceit here surrounds questions of the ethereal nature of youth. When our four spring breakers set off on their adventure, Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson), Cotty (Rachel Korine), and Faith (Selena Gomez) are looking for a change of scenery. College life drab and dull. We see the same things everyday, Faith whimpers in a voice overs that weaves through dreamy images of campus life. In an empty dorm, the girls do handstands, clawing up the walls with their feet. They want out, but they have no money. That drives the bold bad girls of the crew to take drastic measures.
Candy, Brit, and Cotty hold up a diner with a toy gun and a hammer — a deliberately startling display of lolita violence — and then light the car they used in the job (stolen from a professor) on fire before buying bus tickets for the quartet, who set off to the promised land of sunny Florida. The blissful, Girls Gone Wild video shoot that follows is paired with Faith’s meandering reflections on herself and her identity, struggling to reconcile the rejuvenation brought about by bacchanalian fun with her ambivalence towards the mayhem spurned on by her faith (yes Korine names his Christian girl Faith). In these moments, Spring Breakers seems an attempt at a poetic exploration of unhinged youth and pleasure and the body’s role in finding solid ground for the nascent soul. But a police bust at the party throws the chips in the air, and when they land, the four girls have fallen into the grasp of a local hustler, James Franco’s Alien.
Franco is easily the most charismatic and captivating thing about this movie. Amidst Korine’s ethereal musings, Alien’s dynamic presence lends dramatic weight to the material and a little thrust to its narrative direction. Faith can’t stomach the situation, as Alien leads the girls around like his spring breaker trophies, taking them to local haunts that are populated by African American locals and not the glossy white Abercrombie college boys that bounced around on the hotel balconies. Delicate Faith’s enthusiasm for her co-ed retreat evaporates, while her diner-robbing cohorts take up the gangster dream offered by Alien.
The glossy, flip book cinematic style Korine employs here is appropriate for a film grappling with surfaces, with what comes across as a consumer-driven vision of identity. These characters long for their dreams, and their dreams are escapes, and the cinema’s penchant for dreamy escapism is enveloped in Spirng Breakers’ very form. And there is something visceral, exciting, and anarchic about the aftermath of Alien’s infiltration of the girls’ dream, as the American right of passage devolves into something like a Robespierrean Charlie’s Angels. Candy and Brit become bikini-totting murderous thugs, enamored with – and perhaps manipulating – their simpleton master, a man who, for all his bravado, money, and guns, is just another man-child wrapping himself in a fantasy world.
The two best scenes take place in Alien’s bed room. In one Franco’s character shows off his cash and guns – “Look at all my stuff,” he shouts, like a gleeful boy showing the girls the frog he just caught in the creek – and another Brit and Candy grab one of those guns and force Franco to perform mock oral sex on the muzzle. These two moments seems to contain the extent of Korine’s dramatic vision, a world that is reducible to crass, consumerist desires and a crude mash-up of sex and violence. It is a cynical, but captivating vision, compelling because in many ways contemporary society seems to easily reduce into this caricature. But despite its copious boob-shots, there is something moralistic about Korine’s film, which presents a hyperbolized trajectory of pleasure-seeking. There’s a reason why Spring Breakers can lead nowhere else but a Miami Vice-style villa shootout between Alien and his girls and a rival gang banger. Spring Breakers’ vision is a product and a symptom of a reality mediated by image, of the way images create and define the dreams we assume to fabricate our identity. But like its characters, this is a film that has difficulty seeing past Narcissus’ reflection in the pool, of discovering anything in the world that dwells beneath the surface.
