Harmony Korine’s “Spring Breakers” has been launched on a wave of trailers and posters that emphasize the nubility of its four bikini-clad hotties, their entanglement during the annual Florida orgy with a gangsta rapper played by James Franco, and the writer-director’s effervescent Day-Glo aesthetic. Under the sheeny flesh of this exploitative crossover provocation, however, is a freak show as thoughtfully disturbing as such Korine-ian depictions of underclass squalor as “Gummo,” “Julien Donkey-Boy,” and “Trash Humpers.”
Bored out of their skulls with college, where the educational experience has been denatured judging by the sterile sci-fi ambience of the computer classroom, Faith (Selena Gomez) and her less fragile but equally naïve friends Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson), and Cotty (Rachel Korine, the director’s wife) yearn for deliverance. “I’m so tired of seeing the same things every single day,” Faith complains. “Everyone’s miserable here because everyone sees the same things. They wake up in the same bed; the same houses; the same depressing streetlights.”
The answer is… “Spring break, bitches!” After an interlude of lolling around and literally climbing up the walls, the girls put on pink balaclavas, rob a diner, and head for the sun, sand, and sensuality of St. Petersburg in Tampa Bay. Korine took his actresses there and filmed them amid the debauchery.
He sustains the idyll for a long time. From the girls’ perspective, spring break is initially the sybarites’ paradise they were seeking. Yet they are scarcely sexual. Though they pose and preen like glamour models, Cotty alone seems interested in men. It’s noticeable that they’re happiest cavorting on the beach at dusk, away from the baying, swaying hordes and the testosterone overload.
Like all good fairy tales, “Spring Breakers” has its monster – the return of the repressed. Busted for snorting coke at a party, the girls are bailed by Franco’s Alien, a pimp-styled demiurge who has fulfilled his version of the American dream by amassing a collection of guns… and a drawer-full of under-shorts!
Spooked by him, the religious, virginal Faith goes home. She’s soon followed by Cotty, leaving Candy (the toughest of the girls) and Brit (the blandest) to accompany Alien on a crime spree and a violent revenge mission that deliberately leads the movie up a blind alleyway.
For all their sensationalistic pop-art voluptuousness, Korine's images are pregnant with old-fashioned morality. Some are as degrading as anything he has filmed, with or without cockroaches. The documentary-like montage that includes the spectacle of boys feigning ejaculation as they pour beer over the faces and breasts of willing half-naked girls during an organized beach game may indicate that Korine is serving up the sequence for “American Pie” (or “Porky’s”) fans, or indulging “Girls Gone Wild”-style misogyny. More likely, it’s goal is to appall, while slyly reflecting back to the film’s intended teen audience the unnaturalness of porn-inspired behavior.
The polemic, intended or not, is underscored by constant ironic simulations of oral sex, as first demonstrated by Candy in the classroom. This reaches critical mass when, romping on a money-strewn bed with Candy and Brit, Alien goes down on his guns, eliciting Candy’s sexual contempt. Such is expected from the button-pushing Franco, but men in the audience who fancy themselves playas might squirm with recognition.
“Spring Breakers” (opening in New York and Los Angeles on Friday) is being distributed by the indie company A24, which will follow it in June with Sofia Coppola’s “The Bling Ring,” based on a factual Vanity Fair article about a bunch of L.A. high-schoolers (a boy and four girls, one played by Emma Watson) who burglarized the Hollywood Hills homes of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Orlando Bloom and Miranda Kerr, Rachel Bilson, and other celebrities. Like Korine’s quartet, the young felonists also describe themselves, post-modernly, as “bitches” – the ironic co-opting of the word barely mitigating the generation's self-lacerating spite. The currents of amorality, vacuity, materialism, and decadence in these films don't amount to a national teen crisis, but they do show the perils of entitlement. Who would have thought that a nervous Christian plsayed by Selina Gomez would point the way to spiritual salvation?