Girls gone wilding

Spring Breakers is a curiously twisted mixture of exploitation flick and oddball art project. The spectacle of beer-sloshed, drug-fueled, semi-naked revelry is there for all to see, but just who this film aims to please becomes a matter of some confusion, a confusion that seems deliberate on the part of writer-director Harmony Korine (Gummo, Trash Humpers).

Korine, who also wrote the screenplay for Larry Clark’s edgy film Kids, has concocted an unabashedly lurid tale in which four naively rebellious college-age girls “go wild” on spring break in Florida. They finance the trip via a restaurant hold-up, and once in Florida they become entangled with an unctuously lubricious gangster/rapper (James Franco, decked out in cornrows and gold teeth).

Right from the start, Korine is dealing in clichés but churning them out with an exuberance that is at times almost rhapsodic. All the characters and the female foursome in particular are walking, jiving, voguing clichés themselves, and Korine’s indulgent, excessive presentation of them as such not only insists on that point but also provokes by way of redundancy.

Spring Breakers makes its show of pandering to an audience already well-attuned to the fantasies and hype of music videos and youth-market reality TV. There’s plenty of R-rated sex, drugs, and nudity in play here, but the tale of the foursome’s week of acting out is plainly headed toward misadventure before Candy, Faith, Brit and Cotty have even arrived in Florida.

Faith (Selena Gomez) and to a lesser degree Cotty (Rachel Korine) are the characters who show some moral compunction, however belated, in all this. But Candy (Vanessa Hudgens) and Brit (Ashley Benson), the prime instigators of outlaw behavior in this bunch, are the only ones implicated in all the action, right through to the amusingly perverse but not-so-surprising violent ending.

That ending, climactic but not particularly satisfying, seems to me to be the final instance of the film’s basic pattern of action: the indulgent playing out of callow fantasies followed by a desolating obliviousness to consequences, real or imagined. Korine indulges the film’s characters and its presumed audience as well, but mixes things up in ways that deny final satisfaction to both.

When Candy and Brit are gearing up for the hold-up at the beginning, they urge each other to “act like you’re in a movie or something.” It’s an emblematic line for Spring Breakers, which is itself “a movie or something” about (and perhaps for) people whose sense of themselves has not yet risen above the feeblest imaginings of contemporary pop culture.

All in all, Korine’s film has an amusing satirical snap to it, and there’s a nifty brio to the cinematography, editing and sound design. It’s minor, but not without its own offbeat charm.