![]() Korine also endows these images with sinister undertones, achieved via oversaturated colors, rapid cutting between images, slow motion, and an abrasive techno score. Taking this once-popular programming as a jumping-off point, Harmony Korine’s hallucinatory Spring Breakers begins with a montage of college kids enacting an R-rated version of MTV’s coverage, bare breasts being soaked with beer and plentiful bong hits replacing the more television-friendly images peddled by the former music-video giant. Starting in 1986, the network effectively sold this fantasy by repeating endless images of scantily clad bodies gyrating away on beaches to the latest pop hits and beautiful people lounging around the pool. It is an entirely pagan entertainment.For a generation of youthful television viewers, MTV’s spring break coverage defined the annual pilgrimage in which college kids ventured to Florida for a week or two of sex and booze in the sun. I suspect the idea never occurred to Harmony Korine for a moment. Given Faith's background, I wondered if there would be some reference, ironic or otherwise, to Good Friday or Easter Sunday – the events that license the holiday. Much is made of her attendance in Christian prayer groups, which sometimes convene in front of a huge stained-glass window. Where, precisely, he is strutting to is another question.Īs for Faith, the good girl, her role is unexpected. There is an undeniable directorial strut in Spring Breakers. The colossal party scenes – in the pool, on the beach, in the hotel room, on the balcony – are coolly choreographed in montage, and the more desolate "reportage" shots outside all-night convenience stores look good. It is a world away from his (interesting) experimental piece Trash Humpers, and also, thankfully, from his excruciatingly annoying drama Mister Lonely. He leches over the women, but he is also on their side. Korine is giving us a preselected, pre-auditioned representation of youth and beauty.įor all its absurdity and voyeurism, Korine brings to it a real authorial style. Alien is always gasping at how pretty his foursome are: giggling, they pose for the imaginary photo he frames with his fingers – and yet all the women and indeed men on camera are pretty. Like that other spring-break classic, Piranha 3D, Spring Breakers is naturally an excuse to show lots of semi-naked women and men – but mostly women – with in-your-face/in-their-swimsuit-area shots. All too clearly, Korine is ventriloquising himself with this character. Alien conceives a kind of passion for these women, like a non-pimp pimp who doesn't intend them to have sex with anyone but him. He is played with tattoos, metal teeth and cornrows by Franco. Taking Faith with them, they head for party central in the Sunshine State, falling there under the dangerous spell of the drug dealer, rapper and automatic-weapons-enthusiast Alien. Our heroines are desperate to go on spring break, but have no money – so with daring, masks and a fake gun, they knock over a fast-food restaurant and gloatingly exult in their cash ("It makes my tits look bigger!"). From their kindergarten days, they are friendly with Faith (Selena Gomez), a modest Christian girl. These badass girls are Brit (Ashley Benson), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens) and Cotty, played by the director's wife, Rachel Korine. The plot concerns college students who are bored with their course and their lives: they zone out and pass rude notes to each other during lectures on African-American experiences in the postwar US this academic subject is a deadpan touch of insolence on Korine's part, considering the overtly racial aspect of what is finally to happen. ![]() ![]() Korine became notorious with the script he wrote for Larry Clark's Kids in the 1990s and now, at 40, he has achieved … well, not maturity exactly, but a kind of seniority, bordering on the maestro-perviness of the great Clark himself. After a while, you have to wonder where the heck they are keeping their hotel-room keys, cash and phones etc. He creates four lissome heroines who appear in their bikinis pretty much all the time. Henry Barnes, Peter Bradshaw and Catherine Shoard review Spring Breakers .uk
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