Following a numbing near-pornographic opening credit sequence of hedonistic beach bash debauchery, Spring Breakers introduces a quartet of vacuous nubile college students – Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson, Vanessa Hudgens and Rachel Korine - who yearn only for escape from the tedium of their existence. Financially strapped, the girls turn to armed robbery for cash and book it to Florida, where they become entrenched in the booze-soaked reverie of the annual festivities. Fate takes a turn for the weird, however, when a drug bust inadvertently draws them into the realm of Alien (James Franco), a grilled and blinged-out rapper/gangster with dreams of moving up in the underworld. Soon, the bikini babes are donning ski masks and packing shotguns, giddily intent on living the thug life, the hell with repercussions!
A provocateur from day one, when he penned Larry Clark’s Kids at the age of 19, Korine isn’t a particularly subtle filmmaker (the male gaze is cranked up to intentionally creepy extremes here), yet he is a fearless one. Trapping the audience in his female protagonists’ warped, stunted headspace, he subjects us to their banal thoughts, which are often drearily repetitive, disconnected from reality (“Pretend it’s a video game or a movie!”) or amoral. One sequence features a voice over from Gomez’s Faith – the one sorta-good-girl in the group – wherein she describes the “spiritual” experience she’s having in un-self-aware, trite drivel. Today’s entitled American youth, the director seems to argue, lack imagination and insight, and share no contemporary artistic common ground profounder than Britney Spears (whose auto-tuned anthems feature in two key scenes).

Korine hasn’t created an easily digestible work here. This is a picture destined to be misinterpreted, ridiculed and dismissed by many. But those tuned into its queasy wavelength will discover likely one of 2013’s most remarkable efforts; a movie that dares you to revel in its gaudy orgy of bad behavior while slyly flipping off those who would do just that. Spring Breakers lives boldly in the moment, and mournfully shakes its head for the future.
4 out of 5
*Originally published in BeatRoute Magazine.

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