Every American teenager has to endure the rite of passage that is spring break. Likewise, every Disney
princess must go through their own rite of passage: the sexy phase. It occurred with the likes of Britney and
Miley Cyrus, and now it’s the turn of Vanessa Hudgens and Selena Gomez. In a desperate attempt to lose her innocence,
you can now hear the High School Musical star
spouting lines like “Looking at all this money is making my p*ssy wet”.
This is the level of Korine’s Spring Breakers, a film that’s marginally above pornography. It’s a film about the loss of innocence as
four girls on spring break in Florida get involved in a crime ring led
by Alien – James Franco dressed as Sean Paul doing a laughable impression of a
white gangster. It's a mirror image of everything that's wrong with American teenage society.
Korine’s camerawork and editing is agitated and fidgety,
overlaying images and voiceovers into a ninety minute long montage accompanied
by a Skrillex score. Much like a music video, it's a reflection on pop culture. It certainly
creates forward momentum, but the rhythm is ruined by the amount of
repetition. The same lines and footage
are replayed again and again, which somewhat overstates the point. Paradoxically, the urgency of the cinematography
is undermined by the glacial pace of the narrative, a narrative that is filled
with plot holes and requires the audience to suspend their disbelief on too
many occasions.
The composition of the provocative images is well
constructed and, at times, powerful. Take,
for example, the prominent image of the girls dressed in bikinis and balaclavas,
holding machine guns whilst dancing around a piano played by Alien. The significance of the song choice – Britney’s
Everytime, her own anthem to loss of
innocence – is obvious. Yet so often
Korine’s sleazy camera caresses the girls in oversaturated colour, daring to
look beneath the pool water at their nubile bodies, which becomes uncomfortably
voyeuristic. This is matched by Alien's eerie repetition of "spring break" like some drugged-up, perverted ghost. The visuals may be
provocative and subversive, filled with gratuitous nudity and sexual and phallic symbolism,
but never again do I wish to see James Franco deepthroating a pair of pistols.
Much of the narrative is left open-ended, but as such it’s
difficult to comprehend Korine’s point of view.
Spring Breakers is essentially
a film about female empowerment, but it’s negated by the constant objectification of women throughout. Initially we sympathise with Gomez’s Faith
(the religious one, obviously) who, fearing for their safety, flees for home,
but Faith is quickly swept aside – literally and figuratively. Florida is shot as a sun-dappled, glamorous
paradise filled with violence – should we feel sorry for these girls as they’re
seduced by corruption? Is Korine
condoning this slutty behaviour? Are the
girls really changed for the better?
Ultimately, Spring
Breakers presents four silly little girls playing at being adults in a
series of provocative images that amount to very little. There may be some artistic merit in Korine’s
cinematography, but for the most part this film borders on the abhorrent.
Spring break for never.
2/5
