Spring Break forever, or not for forever, that is the question. I had the opportunity to see Spring Breakers last month at the SXSW Film Festival and ever since then I’m been struggling to articulate how I felt about the experience. It’s one of the most divisive films I’ve ever seen. Not only in amongst the crowd – a love it or hate it sort of reaction was obvious – but also in amongst myself.
At once, the experience of seeing Spring Breakers was entertaining, bizarre, surprising and hilarious. On the other side of the coin, I felt like I was stuck in a music video that I couldn’t escape and the experience was one of the more painful in recent memory. As in physically painful. I felt sick. My eyes hurt. And though I wasn’t alone in this sentiment, I can perhaps in part blame a few too many drinks throughout the day. This was SXSW after all. But I digress…
The film chronicles the exploits of a group of college girls who will do anything it takes to have the ultimate Spring Break experience. From the outset it’s clear than the girls are distinguishable by either being “bad” or “not so bad”, but all in all they’re looking for a drug and sex fuelled adventure that signifies the Spring Break experience in Mexico. Along the way, these girls – made up primarily of ex-Disney stars (Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson) who are clearly keen to strip away their good girl images (quite literally) – meet Alien, an over-the-top gangster played expertly by James Franco, who takes them on a very different Spring Break adventure. Spring Break, forever.
The scenes with Franco are golden, his character of Alien is one of the most entertaining to grace our screens in some time. But this relatively straight forward story is then cut into pieces by a frenetic editing structure which sees each scene repeated over and over again, before and after, repeated dialogue used as a voiceover, while a Skrillex infused soundtrack and plenty of neon, slow motion Spring Break party shots tie up all the insanity in one tight package. I get what controversial director Harmony Korine was trying to achieve here – a comment on the bizarre Girls Gone Wild, Spring Break lifestyle that has been glamorised by MTV and the hordes of teens that descent on a pile of debauchery in Mexico every year.
It perhaps not only attacks the expectations and conceptions of the people who attend these events, but also the conceptions of the outsiders, the parents and the public who, from a distance, probably think that this is exactly what’s going on when their kids go to Mexico for Spring Break. Maybe the film should be called “You Parents Worst Nightmare Realised In Music Video Format”. But did Harmony really have to go to such visual and aural extremes to achieve this? Well, that’s probably like asking “What is Art?” – there is no real answer for this, only the vision of the director and the end product we have in front of us.
How on earth do I give this film an honest score. A film which on one side felt like lazy filmmaking – style over substance, the sort of snarky, pretentious filmmaking that makes you feel like you’re having shit piled onto your eyes and you’re expected to like it because it wouldn’t be proper to say otherwise – while on the other side has enough of said style to make the film incredibly entertaining, and entirely memorable. If I had walked in, seen the Britney Spears sequence and walked out, I think I would have been totally sastified by the experience.
I feel like within the neon bright, insane edit there is certainly a entertaining film here, but in deliberately trying to create something so devisive that it literally makes you want to throw up with an hour and a half of non stop cuts, bright lights and dance music, the standout moments are camouflaged in a sea of tanned, naked bodies, and piles of guns (LOOK AT MY SHIT!)… and Skrillex. Spring Break, forever? I honestly have no idea.
Review Score: Not Rated
Spring Breakers opens in Australia on May 9th.
