SPRING BREAKERS

US, 2013, 94 minutes, Colour.
James Franco, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Britt, Selena Gomez, Rachel Korine.
Directed by Harmony Korine.

Interesting is not the first adjective that comes to mind while watching this surreal and gaudy film.
Spring Break films (and there have been many over the decades) are generally an excuse for showing college students behaving badly, a self-indulgence experience where goals are completely hedonistic, sex, drugs, sex, drugs, sex…
This is all here in Spring Breakers (and then some). There is a credit for costume designer (which would have made almost no demands for the female characters). But Harmony Korine is making an ambiguous film, boring us into understanding as someone wrote.
The film is like a visual collage rather than a narrative. One can draw out a narrative. Four girls think they live boring lives (though one is a born again Christian) and are determined that their spring break is going to free them and change their lives. What is involved is a robbery for them to finance their holiday, an encounter with a gold-filled toothy mounted chacter called Alien. He finds them in court, takes a shine to them but is also interested in getting them to do some of his dirty work against a rival. It ends badly for some of them.
But, it is a collage, not presented in linear form, dipping into episodes moving backwards and forwards in time, repearing phrases, especially phone calls home to mother or grandmother. It is as if the director told the cast what to do, how to pose, perhaps improvise with some dialogue and then films short sequences, ready to edit them in whenever he feels like it. This means that the performances, especially of the girls (who are a bit interchangeable), do not create credible characters, cyphers for the points Korine wants to make. James Franco, on the other hand, with those gold teeth and banded hair-do, is much more successful. But, he too is still presented as a collage character. There is also a black dealer and his women and a violent end.
Many commentators have said that Korine is anti the spring break ethos. Probably, but there is lots of sex and sand and drugs that looks like self-indulgence as well.