Directed by:
Harmony KorineScreenplay:
Harmony KorineCinematography:
Benoît DebieCast:
James Franco, Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine, Heather Morris, Ash Lendzion, Lauren Vera, Justin Wheelon, Rod Grant, Josh Randall (more)VOD (1)
Plots(1)
Four sexy college girls (Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine) plot to fund their best spring break ever by robbing a fast-food shack. During a night of partying, the girls land themselves in jail clad only in bikinis. Infamous local gangster Alien (James Franco) bails the girls out, taking them under his wing, Together they embark on the wildest spring break trip in history. (Icon Home Entertainment)
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Reviews (10)
An artistic rendition of a girls’ trip to Florida or a perverse probe into the world of booze, drugs and weapons? Korine wants to film art, but emptiness filled with repeating scenes or whole sentences, strange lighting and filters (at least imho) just isn’t art. Empty prattle about friendship, supported by emotional imbalance and a freaky ending that brings the young generation a message involving a really good slapping. A huge positive role is James Franco’s Alien who overacts as much as possible, enjoying the caricature of a white black gansta/rapper to the last drop. Ingenious manipulator or stoned nut-job? I’d like to see a prequel showing his rise.
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Spring Breakers is a film about love and anarchy. In quotation marks and with the colour palette of Skittles. Korine uniquely blends a trashy plot and hyper-stylised MTV/R&B/YouTube aesthetics with a “flowing” form of storytelling, such as that found in The Tree of Life, for example. The unvarying, hypnotising trance rhythm, the constant repetition of lines (in the style of Chuck Palahniuk’s novellas) and the recycling of shots (or, as the case may be, the ways in which they are composed), leads to a dramaturgical compression of all scenes to the same level. They do not have any particular aim, like the female protagonists as they live out their permanent vacation, nor does the film escalate (conversely, the scenes in which we would expect more action are shot in an absolutely disinterested manner – see, for example, the restaurant robbery filmed in one shot through two panes of glass). Not much changes with the arrival of Alien, since gangsterism turns out be just as repetitive as anything else. It does not matter WHEN something happened or will happen. By jumping back and forth in time, the film rather prevents us from constructing a coherent storyline. The main thing is that something is happening right now. We are constantly kept in a state of being overwhelmed by audio-visual stimuli. Reality and make-believe, high and low, raw shots and lyrical shots all merge into one. This is clearly an attempt to approximate the way in which the female protagonists and Alien experience their surroundings, as the film takes on Alien’s perspective for some time in the second half. Conversely, Faith and Cotta’s return to reality is filmed altogether realistically, without visual enhancements creating the impression of an endless acid trip, when the colours seem to be bolder and the movement slower. Another subjectivising element is the voice-over (calls home) consisting of sentences that starkly contrast with what we see on the screen. Is this really how today’s youth imagine paradise? In this matter, Korine’s frantic postmodern collage is just as indeterminate as his attitude toward the female protagonists in unicorn ski masks and bikinis and toting Kalashnikovs like some sort of commercialised version of Pussy Riot. However, political matters are unimportant to them (instead of listening to a lecture on civil rights, they draw pictures of penises), as are gender issues (they do nothing to stop Alien from turning them into more of his “shit”). They want to destroy only because they do not see any sense in more established values. There is no doubt that we should despise them, but what they do is filmed so seductively… 80%
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This spiritual film for a world without God reveals to viewers a planet made up of dreams in music-video hyper-reality that can actually be tangible. It’s enough to just strike the right pose and time is suddenly transformed from an flow into unnoticeable a looping collage, where minutes do not tick by, but pulse like neon lights. However, this can all dissipate very rapidly – all it takes is to step out of the pose for a moment, but then there is now way back. On the cultural/generational surface, Korine’s DJ-like spinning isn’t subversive in such a way that it would result in an appealing gesture as in the previous generational film Kids, written by Korine, but exactly the opposite. Instead of a warning, Spring Breakers is an intoxicating and sensually intense temptation. It is a materialisation of the enchanted circle of hyped-up posing encouraged by pop culture and becomes a part of that. If gangstas have been watching Scarface on loop up to this point, now college kids will put on Spring Breakers as the ultimate demonstration of how to get properly pissed off. It’s absurd to read reflections whose writers take an elitist approach to defining themselves against a supposed audience that will leave the cinema annoyed or devastated because they had expected another Disney farce with Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens, and yet they enthusiastically chant, “Spring break forever, bitches.” They thus oddly illustrate that Korine is not in the position of a moraliser or an unbiased observer, or a biased connoisseur in the mould of John Waters. On the contrary, he represents for viewers the same kind of devil/enticer that Alien is for the film’s female protagonists. Those who don’t escape in time will give themselves over to him without reservation.
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The final form of the film is the polar opposite of what I originally expected from it. I went into it expecting pure teenage masturbation over the backside of Selena Gomez and her friends, which someone like Stifler would have summed up simply with the words "boobs, titties, hooters, knockers", but in the end I got a truly serious criminal plot with an execution so provocative, novel and ironic that it was simply irresistible. Korine laughed in my face, filmed it in his own way and according to his own rules, and did it extremely well. It's a pity that by the end he went a bit overboard with the laughs and that he repeated some of the "jokes" so often that they lost all credibility. And it's a shame that Selena packed up halfway through the film and never showed up again :-) Quite an interesting surprise, but unfortunately it doesn't deserve more than 55% after the first viewing.
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Enter the void of masturbation fantasies of lovers of beach bitch parties, tits, beer and guns aesthetics. A fluorescent dream on the edge between anti-thesis and interest in the artificial mythology of MTV clips. Hypnotic, engaging, provocative, subversive (Britney Spears meets Pussy Riot) and most importantly - James Franco was born for the role of the Alien. "This is the fuckin' American dream. This is my fuckin 'dream, y'all! All this sheeyit! Look at my sheeyit!"
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