There are few films like writer and director Harmony Korine‘s weirdly chaotic and experimental dip into excess Spring Breakers, a movie that flies in the face of most traditionally plotted stories you see on the big screen. It’s brash and bold, exploitive and controversial, hard to get hold of and and even more so difficult to stay with. And yet, it’s undeniably seductive, they way it unspools it debauchery, luring you into its trap with baser hooks before revealing its larger impact. Been keeping clear of it? Sure that it’s not for you? Well here’s 5 reasons why it’s time you finally watched.
5 You Ain’t Seen Nothing Like It
In a breath, Spring Breakers follows a group of college girls who fund their trip to Florida by robbing a restaurant, which opens the gate for much worse when they arrive south to party. It’s a movie that feels like 90 minutes of an intro where you keep waiting for it to officially start, the camera and ‘story’ skipping around loosely as if Korine is incapable of any kind of focus. And you’d think, just from that description, that would make this all the more unpleasant, or at least unwatchable, but that’s not the case, his film like a hallucinatory dreamscape where anything is possible though fitted with landmines of explosive, drug-infused anarchy. It’s a visually arresting, neon soaked, synth-beat head trip with limited dialogue that will initially feel incomplete yet is anything but.
4 It Wants You To Hate It
Beginning with a slow-motion montage of sun saturated beach-going twenty-somethings on the beach drinking and flashing skin (lots of skin), it gets right in your face about what it’s going to be, giving the MTV Beach Party TV shows an uncensored filter of reckless, hedonistic abandon a spin, never letting that go as it circles back throughout while tracking the fates of these young women. You feel this sort of okay-I-get-it rage coming over you as Korine pans his camera over the bodies of (mostly women), cutting – especially early on – to images of Christianity where the conflicted (and in-your-face named) Faith (Selena Gomez) wrestles with her friendship of her troublemaking friends as it faces off against her her beliefs. It’s not helped by the fact that these friends, Brit (Ashley Benson), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), and Cotty (Rachel Korine) act like degenerate loose cannons with only sex, drugs, and crime motivating them, making it impossible to like them (even though you will). Of course, that’s the point (read on).
3 Yeah. James Franco
In all of this is a guy named Alien (Franco), a semi-famous local rapper, drug kingpin, and arms dealer, who bails the girls out of jail and recruits them into his little thorny fold of trouble. Franco, who is no slouch when it comes to over-the-top, does one better in tight dreadlocks, shiny silver dental caps, tattoos and a greasy accent, diving headfirst into the buffoonery with so much commitment he absolutely sells the crazy and then some. He is the very embodiment of evil, seemingly conjured by the young women in their pre-Florida antics. It’s sinister and unclean, a wolf leading lambs to a den of oblivion. But who are the real wolves?
2 Parody or Commentary
You are most certainly not at all familiar with the lifestyle this movie shines a light on, and good for you because so. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist of course, but Spring Breakers settles for curiosity, keeping you guessing if this is a kind of metaphorical play on the temptations of evil or an outright essay on the plight of the innocent when fallen into the wrong crowd. At times it looks and acts like a fantasy, nothing about it authentic yet soaked in a message we should all take to heart. Then it swings in another direction and thumps with a hard-hitting edge where it’s almost devastatingly real.
1 Faith No More
As mentioned, Gomez plays a girl named Faith, who is the moral center of the film, of course, the story showcasing her devotion early, though careful to make it superficial with images of trope-ish religious iconography; church groups, stained-glass windows, etc. These are what define Faith as she becomes lured into the poor choices of her friends. It’s important that she does this, that she follows them into the darkness of spring break where she thinks it will be parties and beaches, not realizing how quickly it can devolve into crime and then worse. She has an encounter with Alien shortly after he gets her out of jail, and it becomes a pivotal moment in the true journey of these young women. I won’t say what the result is of that confrontation, but it says everything about what we should take away from the chaos it eventually becomes. Watch this movie. Hate it. Love it. Experience it.