15.4.13

SPRING BREAKERS

Sinds vorige week is Harmony Korine's nieuwste film Spring Breakers ook in Nederland te zien en is er op de stoep van mening filmtheater een langgerekt 'Spring breeeeaaaak... Spring break foreeeeever...' te horen, een kleine hommage aan gangstarapper Alien, James Franco's beste rol tot dusver.

Voor Subbacultcha schreef ik een mini-recensie van de film, op te zoeken in de digitale versie van het tijdschrift hieronder. Ook schreef ik een toevoeging, over de overeenkomsten tussen Spring Breakers en Paradies: Liebe van Ulrich Seidl. Deze toevoeging is niet in Subbacultcha te vinden, wel onderaan deze post.

First of all

Spring Breakers, Harmony Korine's best effort since Julien Donkey-Boy, is a meditation on a society obsessed with both innocence and the ugly triangle of sex, money and violence. The story revolves around four random college girls with the annual raunch fest of spring break on their minds. Since fun costs money, they violently rob a diner and spend their hard earned cash money on partying hard in Florida. But there's more to this place than just teenagers getting drunk. Enter Alien, a would-be gangster whose license plate says "BALL R". The poor acting skills of the large part of the cast strangely suit the superficiality of the characters they portray. These are fake people trapped in a fake world. This is, Korine states, what the American dream is made of. 

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Furthermore... 
Spring Breakers would make an excellent double bill combined with Ulrich Seidl's Paradies: Liebe, which recently came out. Seidl's protagonist is an overweight, middle aged Austrian housewife who goes on holiday to Kenya. There, after some encouragement from her more emancipated girlfriends, she gets involved with some local hunks o' man meat. She even gets one for her birthday, wrapped in a nice little bow. Both Seidl and Korine are clearly preoccupied with the hypocrisy of (respectively) Austrian and American society. Plus, both of them have something add to the discussion on female sexuality. Korine's girls exploit their sexuality, Seidl's heroine pays for hers. In both cases it's hard to figure out who has the upper hand in their relationships: the man or the woman. It hardly seems a coincidence that both Seidl and Korine collaborated with their wives on these movies.