Florida Girls, Biblical

Harmony Korine spent years making films that felt like being trapped inside someone else’s fever dream—Gummo’s portrait of bored Midwestern kids doing terrible things, Trash Humpers’ deliberately unwatchable VHS aesthetics—so the prospect of him directing a spring break film starring two Disney Channel alumni was either the worst idea anyone had ever had or the most interesting thing happening in American cinema. Watching the trailer for Spring Breakers, I genuinely couldn’t tell which.

Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens—the clean, branded, merchandise-friendly faces of aspirational teen stardom—in bikinis with guns, committing crimes, falling into the orbit of James Franco as a corn-rowed rapper named Alien who looks like he was assembled from everything your parents ever warned you about. Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine round out the four, and nobody in the cast looks like they’re playing it safe. Franco commits completely. There’s a scene where he kneels before the girls and gestures at his possessions with the reverence of someone performing a sacrament, and it plays as both comedy and genuine menace at once, which is harder than it looks.

By the time I was writing about it, the film had already played Venice and TIFF and collected hundreds of reviews despite not yet having a wide release. That gap—festival darling, not yet officially out—is its own strange cinematic limbo, the space where a movie exists as reputation before it exists as experience.

What I wanted, honestly, was to see two women who’d spent their entire careers embodying aspirational innocence lose it spectacularly on screen. That’s a simple and slightly shameful desire, and Korine understood it completely—which is exactly why Spring Breakers does something more interesting than just delivering it.