Spring Breakers (Icon)

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Spring Breakers BD 2D

Rarely has the music, the sound design, and the spoken word so articulated the soul of a film, particularly when that soul is not immediately apparent, trapped in surface nothingness, in bright bubblegum colours and wild teenage hedonism.

“I wanted to start with a bang,” offers writer director Harmony Korine (Trash Humpers) in the directors commentary as the film erupts into half naked gyrating teens on a beach in Florida, doing all the kind of clichéd girls gone wild spring break insanity you would expect. Combined with the hyper frenetic Skrillex music it comes across as a cheesy pastiche, a homage to Aphex Twin’ Come to Daddy clip, all garish debauchery and outlandish excess.

“Play something sweet and inspiring, play something uplifting,” say the girls to an unrecognizable James Franco as Alien, the white gangster rapper, seated at his piano by the pool. He thinks for a second and starts playing Brittany Spears Everytime, a sweet haunting lullaby. Soon he is joined by female vocals, becoming a strange and beautiful duet, and ultimately Brittany herself takes over, as we dissolve into a violent spree, a montage of Alien and the girls clad in bikinis and pink ski masks pushing guns in faces and cracking heads, with spurting blood and hog tied victims. Brittany is something of a spiritual godmother for the girls, her corporately sponsored emotion, and smoothly choreographed image unable to be separated from their very being. They act out her dance moves to Hit Me Baby One More Time in a car park before reminiscing about a brutal violent robbery, all bubblegum and brutality.

The girls, Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, Ashley Bensen and Korine’ wife Rachel spend most of their time in bikini’ partying, getting arrested, finding themselves and losing themselves, diving headlong into the grit behind the glitz, a hedonistic world of gold teeth, money on the bed, group sex and drive by shootings.

“Spring break forever,” Alien whispers all empty cryptic menace and it’s repeated throughout the film, over and over at various moments, like an electronic loop, its meaning subtly changing throughout. In fact much of the dialogue repeats, loops, all hazy hypnotic voice over, a fever dream where our sense of time and space is challenged. Korine calls it liquid narrative, impressionistic, a series of loose emotive scenes vaguely tying things together. “I was wanting to explode time and have it be about a kind of energy,” offers Korine cryptically.

SpringBreakers0024

The score is a collaboration between dubstep wonder kid Skrillex, who offers many of the hyper electronics and Cliff Martinez, former Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer and composer for Drive, Solaris and much of Soderbergh’ filmography. Martinez in particular is remarkable at producing highly emotive transcendental drones, and when the two are combined it provides hyper electronics with heart, offering a surprising depth to the candy coloured surfaces. Martinez too was determined to play against many of the scenes, lullabies during moments of menace, classical strings during dreamy video game gunfights. It’s truly a remarkable score that stands on its own, all emotive acidy electrics, warm drones and hypertension. Many people speak of Martinez’ score for Soderbergh’ Solaris remake in hushed tones, yet his collaboration here with Skrillex is simultaneously beautiful, graceful and seedy, a sugar rush that dissolves into a warm bath.

In the special features Martinez says it all felt like a flashback, like a dream and admits he worried whether it was sustainable for an entire film. Franco calls the film the ultimate mash up, and admits Korine sold it to him as a Brittany Spears clip meeting a Gaspar Noe film. In fact Korine used Noe’ cinematographer Benoit Debie from not just Irreversible but the psychedelic neon bleakness of Enter the Void.

For all its provocative imagery and free flowing narrative there’ an energy here, the kind of hyperrealism you can only get when you cast Disney actors with real gangsters, rappers, random freaks and real Spring Breakers. It’s verite chaos that may all be about surface, yet Korine finds a depth in the bubblegum gloss, in the teenage rites of passage and indoctrinated pop culture in place of emotions, discovering a strange, beautiful and unexpected transcendence in the most unlikeliest place you can imagine. “Spring break foreverrrrrrrrrrrrr.”

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Bob is the features editor of Cyclic Defrost. He is also evil. You should not trust the opinions of evil people.

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