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| Nope, this isn't from "The Bikini Carwash Company 3: Big Trouble in Little Bikinis" |
Probably the best movie I've seen this year, with G.I. Joe: Retaliation
finishing a close second. Could this be the year Adrianne Palicki gets her Oscar? My fingers are crossed!
This review previously appeared in April's ICON and is reprinted with permission.
Harmony Korine’s terrific Spring
Breakers, or as I like to call it, Bikini Girls with Machine Guns, begs to be
dismissed, or worse, embraced for purely lascivious reasons. It shouldn’t.
Korine revels in the exploitative while preserving, even highlighting, the emotional.
The film is erotic, hilarious, and bathed in nightclub neons, but the sadness sticks
like bubble gum in your hair. We’re hooked at each turn. Four girls, eyes open
to everything but reality, dive into the Girls Gone Wild culture without accounting
for the jagged bottom.
It starts off innocently
enough. The college friends want to leave their small, boring town and escape
to spring break. It doesn’t matter if they’re partying pretty hard already—this
getaway promises more. Korine plays the same scenes of sudsy sexed-up fun, with
“spring break” repeated like a chant. The girls have become conditioned to
expect a special kind of debauched glory.
Brainwashed is probably a
better word. So it’s not surprising that three of the girls, Brit (Ashley
Benson), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), and Cotty (Rachel Korine, Harmony’s wife) rob
a chicken joint to raise the remaining cash for the sun-soaked sojourn.
“Pretend it’s a video game,” one of them yells, which tells you everything
about their perspective. Faith (Selena Gomez) doesn’t participate in the
hold-up, probably because she’s the only one with any kind of ethical
foundation. Faith is wisely advised to “pray super hardcore” by a member of her
prayer group.
Initially, the trip
intoxicates Faith, who wants to shut her eyes and preserve it. She’s seen a
different part of the world and is touched by its spirituality. The sentiments
are funny because they are about a place featuring binge drinking and novelty
T-shirts. It’s also an ode to the beauty of a young, uncluttered mind, a sign
of just how unprepared the girls—who do gymnastics in the hallway and sing
Britney Spears tunes without irony—are after they’re arrested during a raucous
hotel room party.
Alien (James Franco), a hip-hop
gangster/wannabe high roller, who has no connection to the quartet, bails them
out. He sees something in them that satisfies his own needs, a notion that
immediately repels Faith. Having the girls around, or those who willingly stay,
fills a void. You can see this in the now-famous “Look at my shit!” scene,
where Alien rattles off his household possessions—“I have Scarface on
repeat”—to the grateful, swooning bunch. This is not the behavior of a
confident man. But Alien gives the girls, especially Candy and Brit, entry into
the thug life—or at least the one that MTV has glamorized. When the girls help
Alien on his rampage, they sport pink ski masks embroidered with unicorns.
Their exploits are filmed in slow-mo or bathed in psycho Easter Bunny colors.
It’s part of the fun of being young, responsibility-free, and on vacation.
For all of the movie’s
freaky behavior and dreamy cool—the fragmented narrative and color scheme makes
Spring Breakers feel like a nightmare poem—Korine exhibits a ton of parental
concern. After their arrest, Faith says, “This wasn’t the dream. It wasn’t
supposed to end this way.” The advice given by the leader of her prayer group—“Every
temptation, He’s going to give you a way out”—isn’t treated as satire but as
good advice. The constant shots of gyrating asses and beer-bathed breasts lose
their allure quickly. What’s left is a lonely, outmanned gangster with an
unresolved blood feud.
Franco now treats his career
as some kind of performance art. That he’s a movie star seems to be a creative
choice—witness his indifferent attitude in roles like Rise of the Planet of the
Apes. As Alien, he turns a hip-hop influenced white boy gangster into a goofy,
pathetic soul. Nothing about the performance is contrived. When Alien sings
that these girls have come from heaven, it’s not some line. Candy and Brit,
however, are more interested in serving as apprentices, not as icons in short
shorts.
I’m writing this a week
before Spring Breakers opens in Philadelphia. Some undoubtedly will buy tickets
to see Hudgens, Gomez, and Benson shed their clothes (and family-friendly
personas) or to see how far the movie goes. These people must not use the Internet,
which is ideal for slack-jawed gawking. Great movies stimulate another organ. Korine
knows exactly what he’s doing in Spring Breakers. One way or the other, the
public will be disappointed. Too damn bad. [R]
