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Teen stars Selena Gomez, Venessa Hudgens and Ashley Benson join Korine’s wife Rachel to play four young and beautiful college students. After holding up a restaurant, the girls set off on a spring break trip of partying and debauchery. Following a police bust the spring breakers find themselves in prison and, refusing to call their parents, they’re at a loss. That’s until Alien (a very on form James Franco) decides to bail them out and take them under his wing, not realising what he’s dealing with until the girls begin to pull the strings.
Korine’s casting is quite a phenomenon. Franco may at times seem to be playing out his career like some half-baked project from a first year art student, appearing in General Hospital and jumping on any piece of beat generation fluff he can get his hands on, but when he wants to he can be terrific. Here we find him channelling Texas' resident wierdo Riff Raff to great effect. Following her exHigh School Musical co-star Zac Efron (who appeared in Bahrani’s decent if disappointing At Any Price at this very festival) Vanessa Hudgens makes her own punt at artistic integrity, joining the squeaky clean Benson and Gomez in what is a major casting coup for Korine. In interviews the girls have claimed it’s just a movie about partying and perhaps they’re right but there is a real sense of art imitating life, Korine luring them in to all this moral ambiguity in exchange for a shot at credibility. Korine himself must have been bighting his tongue with delight as the swarm of tween fans greeted them on the red carpet. How this film is marketed should make interesting viewing, it might even land him his first real dose of mainstream attention.
It was 1995 when a 19 year old Korine blew everyone away with his script for Kids. Around the same time Spike Jonze, with his video for Sabotage, was seen as the godfather of Music Television. The station is by all means a shadow of its former self but how strange that 17 years on it would be Korine who would have more to say about its current audience. He always seemed to be a cut above those west coast generation X-ers, refusing to deal in half measures with films like Julien Donkey Boy, Trash Humpers and the mighty Gummo. With Spring Breakers he could well claim himself to be among America’s greatest agent provocateurs. A fearless, uncompromising director whose work feels as fresh today as it felt almost two decades ago.
