The Beautiful and Damned

Spring Breakers

*½ out of **** 

Directed by: Harmony Korine

Starring: Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine, Selena Gomez and James Franco

Running time: 94 minutes

The opening scene of Spring Breakers is a parent’s worst nightmare and a young male teenager’s wet dream.

Topless women frolic on a Florida beach, soaking in their own drunken debauchery. The camera is usually positioned on two levels, focusing either on the females’ chest or crotch region. A familiar dubstep song blares on the soundtrack. The bare-breasted women lie back, their hips gyrating in the air, as boys (men would be too kind a term) pour booze from cans that stick out from their genital area. It falls into the girls’ mouths, as they taste it with promiscuous joy.

Kids these days.

Spring Breakers is a near-total failure from tasteless auteur Harmony Korine (the screenwriter of Kids), too hollow and stupid to be satire and too bleak to be labeled a parody.

There may be a lot of skin on screen, but the film is hardly revealing about the way teenagers think or act. It is an affront to good taste, but that would not be a problem if the ideas it presented were interesting or convincing. They are not. Spring Breakers is certainly the most boring film ever made to feature a sequence where a man gives fellatio to a loaded gun.

The film follows the exploits of four giggly, vague college girls, who vie to escape from their humdrum small-town life and go to sunnier skies to celebrate spring break. To pay for their travels, the three more rebellious members of the team rob a restaurant with squirt guns and sass (their characters’ names are inconsequential, but they are played by Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine, the director’s wife).

The fourth wheel is a more naïve and innocent Christian girl, aptly named Faith (Selena Gomez, good but also portraying the only character offered any sense of place, direction or moral compass). As her religious guide informs her at the film’s start, “Every temptation is going to give you a way out.”

Florida, as it turns out, is full of temptations, from piffled pop music to parties with pills, puke and promiscuity. The girls scamper around the beach in bright bikinis, observe cocaine-fueled fiestas and partake in heavy drinking. When the police come to break up a house party, Faith and her posse land in jail – only to be rescued by a dreadlocked rapper with silver capped teeth, whose name (Alien) is just as precise to the character’s demeanor as Faith’s.

James Franco plays Alien, a self-parody of the ‘gangster’ persona championed on MTV. In one scene, he brags to the girls that he plays Brian de Palma’s Scarface on repeat and shows off his weapon collection, which recalls the flaunting materialism also employed by one Jay Gatsby.

Although it does not look the part, Spring Breakers is a loose updating of Fitzgerald’s masterwork. Faith is the Nick Carraway, observing social mores evaporate her into an excess of carefree attitudes and materialism. The oft-repeated line of dialogue, “This wasn’t the dream” also clues into the group’s ethos to achieve a better life, influenced by the garish, material society that was present in Gatsby.

The film’s ending shares its bleakness with Fitzgerald’s best stories, but is far too preposterous. The increasingly savage actions of the female characters are absurd and unconvincing.

The characters spout vapid dialogue and are barely defined as articulate people with motives and desires. The quadrant spends more time singing Britney Spears than charting any meaningful emotional terrain.

One stylistic caveat: Korine transitions from scene to scene with a disorienting sound cue, a mix of a safety load and a camera click. It is a cool effect the first time, but obnoxious on the twentieth.

Although Spring Breakers looks great, a myriad of picture-perfect beach shots and hyper-saturated close-ups from frequent Gaspar Noé collaborator Benoît Debie, the film is just as shallow and directionless as its subjects. It is not even fun enough to recommend as a guilty pleasure. Spring Breakers unfolds with the tackiness and vacancy of a trashy pop song played on repeat for 94 minutes, instead by the end, the song we hear is a warped imitation of itself.