

Who would have thought that Harmony Korine’s candy-colored fleshfest “Spring Breakers” would be so unsatisfying? Â But that seems to be the point. Â While watching the movie I kept searching for ways to “make it work” but couldn’t. Â Not as a bacchanal – I found the quick cuts clinical and unsexy. Â Not as a gangster movie – James Franco was more clown than crime boss. Â Not as a parody – it’s too dreamlike and not funny enough. Not even as Korine’s standard detached documentary – the characters have no depth, there are no real connections.
“Julien Donkey-Boy”, a previous Korine film also featuring dysfunctional weirdos, Â offers moments of real emotional connection. Â There’s a touching scene where Chloe Sevigny is pretending to channel the deceased mother of Julien (Ewen Bremner). Â But in “Spring Breakers” everything is detached and suspect, you can never quite believe what is happening onscreen. Â Would four naive-seeming co-eds don ski masks and rob a restaurant with squirtguns and a mallet? Â Would they exalt afterwards?
Throughout the film Korine has you asking such questions. Â Every time you think the film is hewing to a narrative type (coming-of-age, redemption, documentary) you are thrown off base. Â So James Franco’s “Alien” character initially seems ridiculous, then briefly menacing. Â The next time you see him he’s jumping up and down on a bed while holding on to two machine guns saying “Look at my shit!” in a very non-menacing, non-gangster way. Â This is not an organic change, it’s just an inconsistency.
Motion in this movie is created by the scrambling of these filmic conventions, rather than through character development. Â This feels unsatisfying, and throws into relief the tacit agreement we ordinarily make with films: a willingness to trade the enjoyment that comes from having unspoken conventions met – for example the revenge narrative – in exchange for accepting poor writing, no semblance of real life, and a conventional, cowardly point-of-view.
Other disruptive films, for some reason I think of atmospheric French films, simply deny the viewer the usual pleasurable sign-posts. Â Spring Breakers shows them in brightly-colored glory, only to have them fade and blur in close-up.