Harmony Korine, 2012, USA
Certainly, the rounded and
engaging girls of “We Are The Best” make the bad girls gone bad of Harmony
Korine’s “Spring Breakers” look ridiculous, wafer-thin and inane. They start
off with a similar sufferance and disillusion of their surroundings and
schooldays. These are the privileged class but nevertheless unhappy with not
having more and not being able to do just what they like. And so they rob a
restaurant with water-pistols, acting like gangster-girls, and head off to
Spring Break to discover themselves. Indeed, they mutter on voice-overs about
such discoveries and that they are amongst the sweetest people, the best
friends ever and that this is a paradise realised: but the truth in the visuals
is that they are simply getting drunk, taking drugs, taking off their tops a
lot, indulging in indulgence and orgies and hi-energy music. Their vision is
vacuous and limited and absurd. It leads nowhere and they offer nothing but
their own vacuity. Inevitably, it would seem, this escalates into the pose and
debauchery of dressing up in nothing but bikinis, guns and Pussy Riot
bunny-masks and going on a killing spree (it’s like the psychedelic MTV-minded
wet-dream of “Gummo”’s bunny-boy).
The shallowness is part of
the point; there is satire here of a privileged generation stoked up on
music-video crime fantasies, pop-culture pose and dressing-up (or lack of), of
particularly American fantasies and aspiration of youthful excess. In fact, it
is no less deep than “Tree of Life’s” cosmic and domestic musings, and like
Malick’s film, “Spring Breakers” strength is as a visual piece, the visuals
transcending and giving meaning and life to the limits of the script and
meaning. Through neon colours, temporal scrambling, an ever-drifting camera and
repetitious phrases on the voice-overs, a psychedelic and dreamy rhythm builds
up, making the film seductive as an ambient mood-piece.
Korine’s greatest letdown is
in failing the girls of his film: that they are barely characters at all and
that their friendship is all the gestures of friendships without substance all
becomes very clear when James Franco turns up and steals the show from under
them. Franco’s performance has been rightly celebrated and he certainly offers
a fine depiction of a shallow, ridiculous character; someone who believes the
tokens of what is supposedly the gangster lifestyle maketh the man. Oh, there
is no mistaking that these girls are his soul mates … although surprisingly,
when a couple of the girls just want to go home, that’s what they do. He isn’t
mean, cruel or sexually sadistic, but he is the only fleshed-out character in
this bikini-kill fantasia: he takes over the voice-over and by the end the
girls don’t even have that to convey the discrepancies between what we hear and
what we are seeing. This also leave the satirical edge all dried up long before
the end. They have one potentially game-changing scene where they turn the
tables on him half-way through his boasting, gunplay and foreplay, but this
proves not be a twist in the tale
where they reclaim their story but a bonding exercise.
But still, the visuals
cascade and blur and push for a genuine pop-fantasia. Had “Spring Breakers”
kept focus the girls and given them their due, it could have been similar to
one of Lana del Rey’s pop-tales of messed-up girls falling for a life of crime,
thinking it’s all part of being cool. As it is, it leaves them nowhere as more-or-less
gun-toting nobodies.
Nevertheless, it’s still
quite a trip through a very minor crime story. If one gives in to the visuals
then Korine emerges as a pop-director who has filtered the nihilism of the MTV
generation into perhaps his most accessible mash-up yet.
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