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Canberra Today 15°/17° | Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review: ‘Spring Breakers’ (R) *** and a half

UNLIKE your traditional chick flick built from the cliches of campus life, teen romance and shopping, writer/director Harmony Korine takes us to the edge of reality’s abyss with this uncompromising tale of four young women bored with college life who rob late-night stores to finance spring break (the US equivalent of schoolies week) and its full-on hedonism on Florida’s sunny beaches.

Korine’s screenplay pulls out all the behavioural stops as they drink, do drugs and party like the world was going to end tomorrow. The film becomes darker when gunrunner, narcotics pusher Alien makes bail for them after being arrested.

James Franco’s powerful portrayal of Alien provides the film’s principal dramatic thread, a gutter-mouthed morally vacant sociopath. Alien’s relationship with four by-no-means innocent but certainly vulnerable young women is a mixture of frightening and caring. We sense impending doom for them in a life far from their families’ expectations. They revel in freedom from parental restraint. And perhaps they are not so blind to Alien’s blandishments as we fear.

While nudity abounds on the beaches and at parties, sexual encounters take a low profile. The young women’s brief bikinis amply make the case for Eros.

As Korine’s defiance of chick flick orthodoxy winds down, we understand that we have seen a well-crafted, no-holds-barred message film about many of the defects that blight US society and to a lesser extent our own.

At Dendy and Palace Electric

 

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