'Spring Breakers' REVIEW: A colorful nightmare on excessive hedonism
'Spring Breakers' REVIEW: A colorful nightmare on excessive hedonism
"Spring break forever, bitches!"
Harmony Korine is most notably known for his edgy, avant-garde films that often deal with ugly and uncomfortable topics. Infamous for writing the 1995 controversial Larry Clark-directed Kids and directing the 1997 disturbingly nihilistic Gummo, he is no stranger when it comes to extremely weird filmmaking. Because of this, most of his films are often met with numerous responses of general disgust and hatred from both critics and audiences alike. They’re all incredibly polarizing, and this candy-colored, sexploitation art-house is no exception.
Released in 2013 by A24 during the company’s founding and early days, Spring Breakers is Korine’s first mainstream film; though, this is still very much like his other previous films: artsy, psychedelic, exploitative, and disturbing. Starring notable young idols such as Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, and Ashley Benson in their first adult film roles, Spring Breakers takes you into a strangely unique journey that takes a jab on the concepts of hedonism, American Dream, and modern youth culture. Like his previous films, this one is quite divisive too. On the surface, it may seem like a pretty shallow film that tries to glorify sex, drugs, violence, and criminal behaviors. But as the film went on, it all becomes clear that it's basically just a cynical satire on these concepts.
The film follows four young female characters (Candy, Brit, Cotty, and Faith) who are constantly complaining about their monotonous college life and how they wake up and see the same things every day. These girls then proposed that they all must go to Florida for a spring break party. The problem is, they're struggling on how to find enough money just to go there. So what do they do? They robbed a restaurant, of course. "Pretend like it's a video game." said one of the girls who probably played too much Grand Theft Auto to get influenced with this kind of sick behavior.
What happened next is a series of hardcore partying, drinking, and snorting drugs. They treat spring break as some sort of soul-searching journey and an escape from their very tedious lives. Like most youth today, these four girls live an ideal life of carefree fun without worrying about its consequences.
It wasn't until they were being arrested. All hope seems to be lost on them but then, a wannabe gangster called Alien (James Franco) bails them out from prison and persuades them to join in his criminal world. Now, it all goes crazy from there.
James Franco (center) with Ashley Benson (left) and Vanessa Hudgenes (right).
Spring Breakers is an intriguingly tragic look of today's youth culture. All the film's depiction of booze, sex, partying, drugs, and violence were just an exaggeration to show just how shallow most of them are with their sleazy worldliness. They are blindly fascinated by the "YOLO" philosophy above all else that their pursuit of happiness only came off as superficial and empty.
Moviegoers expecting to see some hardcore bikini cheesecake action will be surely satisfied during the film's first half as it offers more than a ton of it. However, the second half is anything but that. Not to also mention the fans of Selena Gomez who just wants to see her in her first adult role. Her character leaves the narrative around the 40-minute mark, despite the entirety of it focusing on her perspective and development, making her just a decoy protagonist. After that, the film's narrative perspective changes from Faith's to James Franco's character.
There are three kinds of youth today and the film effectively presented them through its young female characters. Faith (Selena Gomez) is the kind of youth who has limitations and is struggling to balance between what is good and what is bad. She's the only believable and relatable character in the entire film. Cotty (Rachel Korine) is the one who easily gets influenced and has this "go-with-the-flow" kind of attitude. On the other hand, the characters of Candy (Vanessa Hudgens) and Brit (Ashley Benson) are the ones you don't want your parents to know you’re friends with. They are reckless and irresponsible. Their minds are already corrupted with worldly influences that their ideas of "being happy" and having a "good life" are mostly about sex, money, drugs, and partying. Aside from Gomez’s character, all other characters featured in the film are as thin as bikini strings, lacking any sort of development—but that's what makes it scary.
The film emphasized the deterioration of this particular modern youth culture where their definition of "cool" is laughable and how pop culture greatly corrupted and perverted their minds. What made these themes all the more cutting is how Korine incorporated a bunch of pop culture stuff in his film that the modern youth are mostly familiar and associated with - the casting of former Disney stars, the use of popular songs from popular singers (Britney Spears, Ellie Goulding, Gucci Mane), My Little Pony, video games, and even the film itself was shot like a sexualized MTV music video. He uses all of these so that his film can be appealing to mainstream audiences, especially to the youth, and to also show what sort of things most of them venerate today. These examples of hedonistic fantasies are perfectly contrasted with the realities of violence and crime during the film's second half.
Korine also indulges himself in a variety of stylistic and creative flourishes just to satisfy and haunt his audiences in every sensory way possible, auditory and visually. As a result, the entire experience felt like a surreal drug trip that mixes real life and fantasy. The film itself is sprinkled with dark and dreamy colors that produce a hypnotic fever dream that explodes in each and every frame, accompanied with a killer soundtrack.
Of course, it's not a Korine film without any strange moments and this film had plenty of these, from James Franco performing oral sex on two loaded handguns to him repeatedly reciting some rap poetry in a creepy manner. But the one that stood out among the rest is a scene where the female characters, wearing pink ski masks and holding gun rifles, are seen dancing to the tune of James Franco's character playing Britney Spears' Everytime on a white piano against the backdrop of a pink-ish sunset, while a series of montage of them robbing stores and threatening people with their guns are being shown. It was definitely a weird but wonderfully-filmed cinematic moment.
Spring Breakers isn’t so much a film as it is a haunting experience you definitely need to witness. It's wild, it's shameless, it's provocative, it's scary, but most importantly, it's thought-provoking. It is destined to be a cult classic, if not already.
