Review of Spring Breakers (2013) by Peter S — 07 May 2014

In a previous life as an actor, I was part of an ill-judged tour of Henry V around schools.

One of our further tour stops took us to the Isle of Wight and after a relatively incident-free rendition in Newtown, we were accosted as we packed up the set by some of the schoolgirls from the audience, who pleaded with us to take them away - they seemed to be only half-joking. In the fading light, they explained there was nothing to do on the island, with something like genuine distress. They were full of that child-like optimism that neither sensed danger, nor measured distances. Extracting ourselves with a little difficulty, and noticing hearts pierced with arrows drawn into the grime of our crappy white van, we drove off, slightly harrowed by the plight of these teenage girls, to whom our truly rubbish tour was the most exciting thing to happen for a long time.

It is with this basic premise that Spring Breakers commences in the lives of four friends, played by Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, Rachel Korine and Ashley Benson to whom boredom is as much an all-pervasive danger as AIDS. There is no signifier as to which town they hail from, but we can assume from their feelings that it is the kind of nowheresville that girls all over the world dream of escaping.

As it transpires, and in the tradition of much American Cinema that relates a boiling wanderlust (everything from Midnight Cowboy to On The Road) they are prepared to strip themselves down to their basic primal core to achieve their objective of going on the much idealised "Spring Break," a hedonistic American rite-of-passage roughly equivalent to a British teenager's first trip to Ibiza. To this end, they callously hold up a Restaurant with axes, hammers, and (what turn out to be) water-pistols but also with those more valuable assets of speed and the threat of extreme, life altering violence, just like seasoned pros, almost as though they are aping heist scenes from Hollywood, with the simple, modest purpose of making up the deficit of funds for the upcoming trip.

It works, and drunk with the transformative power of discovering their new-found self-determination in a town seemingly designed to limit them, they strike out on a bus packed to the rafters with boys and girls baying for blood to let off the steam of teenage frustration that has sat simmering in their school classrooms for the better part of a year. On their arrival, all seems to be as expected, with the girls riding around on scooters, partying to the level expected, the expected level of boozing, drug taking, nudity etc. However, circumstances change the course of this vacation which their one-time-deal crime-spree has bought them when they are busted for drug taking and given a stark choice by a Judge: pay the fine or do some time. The story is developing as we have been expecting: this is the inevitable bust to their boom.

However, these court-room proceedings are watched with a kind of evidently predatory opportunism by James Franco's "Alien", a not implausible cliche of a metal toothed, dreadlocked, pimp-mobiled local drug "gaingster." He bails them out and soon the 4 are partying hard with various hustlers you would not want to bump into in a dark alley. The bust has not lasted long, though you increasingly expect another bigger one soon.

Harmony Korine makes some strong stylistic choices; the whole thing is shot as though a vivid teenage memory of a very special summer with all of the exuberance, colour and vibrancy of their youthful minds. The odd crash back down to earth is barely hinted at with the odd scene-change sound effect of a gun being (loudly) loaded. Some scenes repeat and echo at crucial junctures. Harmony wants you to see the events unfold the way the girls will, in the main, remember them. He wants you to feel what they feel, the rush, the idealised rawness and see the lurid colours as they would - vibrant and attractive. Some critics have made much of this approach as though it were an exploitative, self-glamorising guns-n-bikinis bid for movie market-share, but this is to miss the point. Harmony wants to really immerse you in their world, offer a backdoor into their memories, and in doing so, to do something which very few movies even attempt, to really portray teenagers and teenage life as they are really experienced.

His approach is not without its limitations, however. He does not really establish quite how dull their home town is, and enough about who they are as individuals, for us to get any kind of payoff when they let slip the bonds of their morals towards an inexorably shallow, yet somehow spiritual goal. We don't quite feel the transformation of albeit worldly girls to one-off hoodlums and then to hired guns for Alien, and this gives the movie the glibness that enabled some critics to round on the feature as a vacuous orgy of sex and violence (and every Harmony Korine film has been derided as exploitative).

This is not a fault of the performances which, when given a little air time, show a compelling depth, such as Selena Gomez's passenger, reluctant as Christian but also as a hoodlum, and particularly James Franco's well-realised gangster, whose seduction of the girls, partly through intimidation, partly through sensitivity, one suspects has been used on many girls before, and whose fearlessness is a kind of trip that extends to every edge of his character, even to his ability to goof off and send himself up at times, every bit the product of the brutal local drug lord that "made" him and with whom a war is brewing, a war, one suspects, that will claim the lives of these semi-innocent girls as collateral damage.

That things don't turn out that way is almost to be expected. Not to ruin the ending, but you wonder why the director chooses something so strangely anti-climactic and difficult to believe and what he wants this to say about the 92 minutes we have sat through.

Spring Breakers is a flawed peak at a thrill-ride through the eyes of thrill-riders. Don't write it off as just another Hollywood helping of violence and sex, there's more to it than that, and Harmony Korine, in showing teenagers at their most raw, is doing something very few other directors in Hollywood are even attempting. Worth seeing.