Starring: James Franco, Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine
Director: Harmony Korine
Category: III
Spring Breakers is easily the most accessible film that American writer-director Harmony Korine has come up with - but even that can be misleading.
His first two features (1997's Gummo, 1999's Julien Donkey-Boy) are cult favourites about freaks, mental illness and family dysfunction. His third film, Mister Lonely (2007), is a surreal portrait of celebrity impersonators and sky-diving nuns. Shot on VHS, the experimental Trash Humpers (2009) chronicled the antisocial behaviour of four young, suburban perverts.
With a track record that transgressive, it would likely be at the audience's own detriment to regard Korine's latest offering as simply a Girls Gone Wild-type sexploitation film featuring two former Disney princesses, Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens. Spring Breakers may well be this director's craftiest film to date.
It is not by chance that when college gals Candy (Hudgens) and Brit (Ashley Benson) are giggling at their own flippant sexual remarks at the film's start, their American history professor is giving a lecture on the civil rights movement in the background.
