Everyone from advertisers to educators say that our young
adult years are supposed to be the best times of our lives. Many of us have
already started to deal with the daunting reality that this assumption is
rarely the case. However, this cliché still exists and many films have
capitalized on the American belief that youth is equal to a kind of universal
freedom of expression. Whether it’s party films such as “Animal House” and
“American Pie”, or the snap shots of suburban decadence like “Dazed and
Confused” and “Risky Business”, Hollywood erroneously reinforces the notion that
if you are young, you have the right to explore your desired excesses and you
will be exalted for your bravery and exempt from any serious repercussions—“Project
X” I’m looking at you.
Harmony
Korine is a writer/director who has never let his youthful characters off the
hook. This is probably best exemplified with his first screenplay for “KIDS”.
Directed by Larry Clark in 1995, “KIDS” was a dark coming of age story about
young, urban New York teens who indulged their sexuality without any
precaution, amidst the AIDS epidemic of the early 90’s. With his own
directorial features, Korine has spent much of his career exploring the darkest
depths of ugly America and the oppressed lives of the underprivileged, often
showing his characters in depraved and hideous situations, some of which are frankly
hard to watch.
In “Spring Breakers”, Korine follows four
college girls while they search for the perfect escape from their dull, small
town lives. Together they collect their
limited resources and plan a trip to Florida’s spring break hot spot. When they
realize that they won’t be able to afford the venture on their own, they
violently rob a local diner and make off, scot-free with their reward. After a
few days of sex, drugs, and booze fueled partying, they get busted with some
cocaine by the police and thrown in jail. Lucky for them, a local rapper/drug
dealer, who goes by the name Alien (James Franco), bails them out and decides
to show them a different side of the beach-side party culture; a side that
includes semi-automatics, drug deals gone wrong, and viscous gang rivalries.
Some
may be taken aback by this film’s seemingly weird stunt casting. Two of the
four lead females are played by the teen-beat, ex Disney queens, Salina Gomez
and Vanessa Hudgens. The other two are played
by television’s Ashley Benson and Harmony’s wife Rachel Korine. They all look exceptionally young and
impressionable and Harmony uses their squeaky clean reputations in order to subvert
the audience’s expectations of what their celebrity represents, as well as
emphasize their vulnerability in the face of the narrative threat. Franco too
gives a daring and layered performance as an aging gansta-wannabe who takes advantage
of the girl’s susceptibility to temptation. In fact, once I was able to look
past the sun bleached corn-rows and the silver plated dental work, he brought to
mind the world-weary and wounded depth of Harvey Keitel’s portrayal in “Taxi
Driver”.
After
some thought, I came to like this movie but despite the fact that this is
Korine’s most mainstream output yet, this is not the kind of film that many people
will groove on. The tweens who enjoyed
Hudgens and Gomez on the Disney channel, or Franco in “Oz the Great and
Powerful”, are going to be shocked and made uncomfortable by the raw sex, the
non-linear editing and moody atmosphere presented. Fans of Korine’s grimy,
gritty indie work may also be surprised by how subdued and ethereal his direction
is here. While his past work always reveled in the grotesque and visceral, with
“Spring Breakers” he is more interested in the quiet interiority of his characters
and the cinematography is purposely gorgeous and colorful. Many of the repetitive
party scenes are shot in slow motion and the music is often played in ironic juxtaposition
with the images, sometimes as a direct parody of, or a critical commentary on
the music video and advertisement style. The ugliness here isn’t in its setting
or actors, or even the way it’s shot—as it was in Korine’s more disturbing
films like “Gummo” and “Trash Humpers”—the ugliness is in its depiction of
youthful debauchery and its acceptance and perpetuation in the mainstream
culture.
Make no
mistake about it; despite its wide release, its dance-rap/dubstep soundtrack,
the Disney-girls-gone-wild, or its seemingly innocuous title, this is art house
movie. While the plot suggests an exploitation, Scarface-esq design, the genre
elements of the film are really only used as a framework for Korine to investigate
his themes and his tonal landscapes. With that said, as genre movie, it doesn’t
really pay off but as a character-study and a critique of mass-celebrated
frivolity, it’s refreshing, original, and strangely hypnotic.
Originally published in The Basic Alternative/April-2013
No comments:
Post a Comment