Spring Breakers (R). Director: Harmony Korine. Starring: James Franco, Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine.
The opening montage looks like the off-cuts from an R-rated cola commercial. Boozed up, barely-dressed teens bounce to dance beats on a beach flooded with preternaturally bright sunlight. The camera picks out the young women on the crowd, clad in bikinis (or portions thereof) amid groups of leering, grinning, buffed up boys.
The 'spring break' as mythologised over decades by countless American films and TV shows is a singularly debauched occasion (its closest equivalent in Australia might be Schoolies) that on one side of the coin represents youthful freedom and a ritualised purging of innocence on the path to adulthood, and on the other the corruption of youth and the objectification of impressionable young women.
Spring Breakers is largely concerned with deconstructing the latter. Its director Korine first made his name as the 22-year-old screenwriter of Larry Clark's cult 1995 film Kids, notable for its bleak consideration of youth culture and its shocking realism. Spring Breakers is bleak too, but instead of realism it adopts a heightened sense of unreality. It is a formally ambitious film that sends mixed messages, making it both intriguing and perplexing.
The disquieting images of that opening montage, which recur throughout the film, seem to represent a kind of idealised vision of the nature of spring break. Idealised by whom? In particular, by the film's four antiheroes — ringleaders Candy (Hutchens) and Brit (Benson), suggestible Cotty (played by the director's wife, Rachel Korine) and token 'good girl' Faith (Gomez) — young women and students who see the reckless decadence of spring break as the certain and only cure for their existential malaise. It must be attended at all costs.
They are short on cash but are so desperate to escape to the haven of spring break that they commit a violent crime in order to get there. This is one of a number of far-fetched conceits that would be harder to pull off in a more naturalistic film. As it is, the pervasive, almost impressionistic tone of Spring Breakers suggests that this is intended as a fable for reflection rather than a thriller for seedy titillation.
The girls seem to speak, and even think, in catchphrases. Their disquietingly hollow platitudes about escaping and breaking