Reseñas de la crítica

Never has a Britney Spears song been so incisively, intelligently choreographed. Never has James Franco, starring as cosmic gangster/rapper Alien and a one-man minstrel show, looked so high off his own supply. Never has spring break looked so liberating and tedious at the same time, when the empty, endless drudgery of partying becomes its own punishment.

What the eye desires - which the camera denies - is to unite the mouths and the legs, the faces and the sexes. The bodies remain divided by a blurred aquatic line which frustrates the senses and provokes excitement. In the open air we have the sensuality of whispers and looks. Beneath we have the abrupt sensuality and voluptuousness of penetration. It is this hazardous alternation which stuns and makes of the camera a fourth playful participant.

What about Spring Breakers, passionately recommended to me as something new and radical not only by several critics, but also by such sophisticated filmmakers as Carlos Reygadas and Keja Ho Kramer, and not as just another let-them-eat-cake and ultimately unthreatening (if doggedly puritanical) provocation crossed with kiddie-porn from Harmony Korine?

With respect to James Franco's cornrowed, grill-mouthed, award-worthy showmanship as Alien, the most subversive quality of Korine's zeitgeist-fellating, sunburnt cartoon of a crime comedy is that it wound up in mall multiplexes across America, but at least this overrated goof exists in the world.

I think that Spring Breakers is a fascinating experience... I would also say, however, that feminist objections with this film strike me as more or less on the mark. This is a heteronormative pornographic film; its pornography is both the root of its most brilliant formal strategies and its most obvious "structuring structure" yet it more than warrants feminist interrogation.

In Spring Breakers, Korine's concerned with re-associating our world and reasserting an ancient connection mostly lost on contemporary US culture. The American Pastoral is not at odds with the crazy violence of America. It's merely its most natural setting. In our myopic pop culture, that keeps our world neatly compartmentalized, Korine forces us to reckon with the true price of Paradise and the true nature of Ecstasy. And if we don't like it, we'd do best to take the early bus back home.

Spring Breakers wears its artifice, its status as Korine's inspired, ignorant fantasy on its sleeve. In doing so it asks that you consider not American History but Art History, after ‘90s rap videos and Wong Kar Wai's gangster films, and before all we see melts into Internet as we see it.

Whether walking around at night with skin exposed or demanding authority while in that same state of undress, the girls delegitimize patriarchal privilege. Korine's band of heroines saunters in front of the camera but give its gaze as much control over them as they give Alien. That is how a film starring four young women in bikinis subverts the trope of female bodies as sites of experience for others. Spring Breakers pumps you with a full erection only to laugh at your boner later.

It seems to me that Korine has little interest in analyzing American cultural mores and dramatizing their contradiction—he'd rather just have a highly polished laugh about it all, but one where he does just enough staring into the abyss to make you wonder if he's asking you to be critical.

The tragedy is not the bumping, the grinding, the tits and ass, the bikinis and handcuffs, the caricatures of hip hop thuggery, the girls gone bad. The tragedy of this film is that it's boring. Teens, rather than being introduced to novel trouble-making, will simply recognize the familiar: Grand Theft Auto-style ballistics, booty shorts, and threesomes ripped from Jersey Shore. Disney princesses flaunting their middle-finger attitudes, just as Lindsay Lohan has done for a decade.

There's something right here: the way that finance's coldly erotic dream of money minted from pure desire must always rest uneasily on the brutalities and immiserations of the real economy; that the world is structured to preserve this fantasy of autonomy for its beneficiaries; that when the fantasy collapses, it is revealed not simply as illusion but as dependent on racialized violence.

The fact that the pieces of story scattered across Spring Breakersare not strung together in a clear straight line, but as the cracked shards of a mirror, is, finally, very much the point: the pleasures of the dream life cannot be neatly separated from its ugly underbelly, nor, at this point, can the lives we live from the cultural kool-aid we imbibe.