Spring Break­ers

Is Har­mo­ny Korine a Brit­ney Spears fan? It’s a ques­tion you might be sur­prised to find your­self ask­ing while watch­ing his lunatic teen odyssey, Spring Break­ers. In the film’s stand­out sequence (and an ear­ly con­tender for scene of the year), a nod to the one-time princess of pop’s heartrend­ing bal­lad Every­time pro­vides an oblique reminder that in Korine’s world, pathos is a (false) virtue.

Ash­ley Ben­son, Sele­na Gomez, Vanes­sa Hud­gens and Rachel Korine (the writer/director’s wife) play four col­lege friends who pull off an auda­cious squirt-gun rob­bery on a Chick­en Shack in order to fund the ulti­mate midterm vaca­tion in south Flori­da (aka coed Mec­ca). They seek excite­ment and new expe­ri­ences, any­thing to off­set the tedi­um of dorm life and sate their ado­les­cent impuls­es. This being a Har­mo­ny Korine film, they get a lit­tle more than they bar­gained for.

There’s a cer­tain self-reflex­ive irony in see­ing a for­mer Dis­ney Chan­nel star­let get her super­f­reak on to Skrillex while being soaked in cheap beer and frat boy hor­mones. So too in the fact that Sele­na Gomez’s nubile Chris­t­ian (apt­ly named Faith) high-tails it before the bong hits and bum-shak­ing give way to more unsavoury extracur­ric­u­lar activ­i­ties. Inci­den­tal­ly, Gomez has pub­li­cal­ly warned her young fans against watch­ing the film. Because god for­bid any impres­sion­able pre­teen might actu­al­ly sub­scribe to this R‑rated first-world fantasy.

And then there’s James Fran­co, smash­ing it out of the park as Alien, a corn­rowed, den­tal-grill-sport­ing Kevin Fed­er­line-a-like who bails the girls out after they get bust­ed at a drug­gy house rave. His vul­gar beach­front pad is a shrine to bad taste and crim­i­nal excess, crammed with mil­i­tary-grade firearms, Class A drugs and neat­ly piled wodges of hun­dred dol­lar bills. He’s got gold bul­lets and a Scar­face DVD on a con­stant loop. He’s the liv­ing embod­i­ment of the Amer­i­can Dream.

There’s a flavour of Gas­par Noé provo­ca­tion in the film’s hyper-flu­o­res­cent palette and recur­ring Girls Gone Wild motifs – indeed Korine enlist­ed Noé’s reg­u­lar DoP Benoît Debie. Yet it’s telling that Spring Break­ers is no more explic­it than your aver­age main­stream teen romp. Korine could so eas­i­ly have pushed it fur­ther, but at times it’s almost as if he’s hold­ing back.

Per­haps he wants this unique­ly sub­ver­sive cri­tique of youth cul­ture to be tak­en seri­ous­ly. Per­haps there’s more to Spring Break­ers than crunch­ing synth and jig­gling flesh. In the desat­u­rat­ed come­down before the third act storm, the girls leave voice mes­sages to their loved ones, express­ing a mutu­al desire to be bet­ter peo­ple and make some­thing of them­selves. They seem sin­cere enough, but Korine’s great­est trick is to make you read beyond the instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion and super­fi­cial plea­sures that sat­u­rate this bliss­ful­ly warped utopia.

So is Spring Break­ers satire or exploita­tion? Does it real­ly have some­thing pro­found to say about how declin­ing social val­ues are lead­ing Gen­er­a­tion Z astray? If you’re left mulling any of that over, you’ve real­ly missed the point.