Spring Breakers

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
2012

Spring Breakers
Harmony Korine
USA, 2012
English
92 minutes Colour/DCP (D-Cinema)
Production Company: Muse Productions
Producer: Chris Hanley, Jordan Gertner, Charles-Marie Anthonioz, David Zander
Screenplay: Harmony Korine
Cinematographer: Benoit Debie
Editor: Douglas Crise
Production Designer: Elliott Hostetter
Music: Skrillex, Cliff Martinez
Principal Cast: James Franco, Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine, Gucci Mane

The overly bright sunshine begins to hurt your eyes. The semi-nude bodies grind in a tequila- fuelled haze. A waft of violence floats through the atmosphere until it dominates the scene, aware of its hold on everything and everyone. You feel all-powerful and totally alone. This is spring break in Florida, captured through the transformative lens of Harmony Korine’s imagination.

Korine’s impressive canon of films poetically chronicles the minor heroics and self-aggrandizing intensity of marginalians, unseen, ignored and dismissed by a willfully ignorant world. In Spring Breakers, his attention turns to four female co-eds (Ashley Benson, Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens and Rachel Korine) in an unnamed college town. Desperate to hit the beach, but flat broke, they rob a coffee shop with fake weapons, steal a car, head south and start to party hard. Their fun gets rudely interrupted when the cops bust into their apartment and find things young girls should not be enjoying. Locked up with no bail money, they despair until a local petty gangster (James Franco) springs them. Two of the girls stay with him as his entourage and, ultimately, his hitmen; while the other two drop out, exhausted, disoriented and longing to experience that rush of freedom one more time.

Spring Breakers is Korine’s first film since Mister Lonely to feature professional actors. He challenges his impressive young cast in unexpected ways, with long, seemingly improvised takes and a demand for shifting tones of sweetness and menace,

The film lands on the more narratively linear end of Korine’s career and has moments that recall each of his previous films, especially the virtuosic tableaux of Gummo and the agonizing desperation of Mister Lonely. But Spring Breakers also brings a few new tricks to the table, including remarkable shifts in mood and a breathtaking cinematic confidence; there are signature moments of montage in this film that will influence generations to come.

Harmony Korine thinks in pictures one else could even dream up.
—Noah Cowan