Faith Goes to Florida and Nothing Good Happens

Two things were obvious about Selena Gomez in early 2013. One: whatever she had going on with Justin Bieber was a Disney-manufactured exercise in mutual brand enhancement—the same kind of staged sweetness that Britney and Timberlake did, that Hudgens and Efron did, the factory-issue cute couple that makes the right demographic coo on cue. Two: she looked insanely good in the promo material for Spring Breakers, and Harmony Korine had the good sense to build a film around that energy while it was at its peak.

Spring Breakers is the movie where Korine took four women with carefully managed images and submerged them in neon, guns, and James Franco’s cornrows. Selena plays Faith—naturally—the religious one, the one who gets out early when the crime stops being abstract and starts being something she’d have to explain to God. She’s in it less than the others, but her exit functions as the film’s moral compass walking out the door, and what’s left gets stranger and more beautiful once she’s gone. Franco’s Alien is one of the great American grotesques, reciting his worldly possessions like a litany, and the women orbiting him are half predator, half willing casualty, which is exactly where Korine wanted them.

The casting logic was simple and brutal: Gomez’s Disney aura clung to her even in the film’s most lurid frames, which made those frames hit harder. You couldn’t unsee where she’d come from, and Korine used that. She played the innocence straight and let the film do the rest. If she keeps making moves this well-calibrated, she’ll be both rich and interesting, which is rarer than either alone.