Rachel Korine packs heat in Spring Breakers, Harmony Korine's most subversive act yet — going mainstream

It's an unseasonably cool March night in Austin, not exactly swimwear weather, so the three women riding scooters down Congress Avenue can be excused for wearing unzipped hoodies over their fluorescent bikinis. At least their faces, obscured by hot-pink ski masks with unicorns on the forehead, are protected from the brisk wind. They honk their horns as they pass the Paramount Theatre, where in 90 minutes, Nashville filmmaker Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers will have its U.S. premiere, the marquee event of the 20th annual SXSW Film Conference & Festival.

The film is an anarchic, unsettling joyride through Florida's spring break ritual featuring Korine's most star-studded cast yet — James Franco, Pretty Little Liars star Ashley Benson and Disney sensations Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens — and advance buzz has far exceeded that for any other Korine project. Festivalgoers hoping to snag one of the theater's 1,200 seats queue up outside the front doors. Throngs of teenage girls gather behind barricades, awaiting the arrival of the film's stars. The unicorn gang, part of a promotional stunt for the film, continues to circle the block with blaring horns, amping up an already hyped crowd.

As a bellwether for buzz and a film showcase advancing on Sundance, SXSW is no stranger to movie-premiere ballyhoo. Still, festival veterans can be heard saying they haven't seen a commotion quite like this. By 8:30, an hour before show time, the main line of badge-holders snakes well around the corner and down the block. Soon a steady stream of black Cadillac Escalades and other cars with tinted windows starts depositing the night's VIPs.

Ear-piercing shrieks erupt as Gomez exits a vehicle. Teen girls, mothers, even middle-aged men hold cameras and smartphones aloft. One girl screams, "Selena, I love you!" then shouts "Priscilla!" — acknowledging Priscilla DeLeon, whose chief claim to fame is showing up in tabloid shots next to her starlet cousin. Similar scenes play out as Franco and Benson arrive. Only Hudgens fans go home disappointed — the High School Musical star couldn't make the premiere due to illness.

This being a film festival, director Korine gets his share of oohs and aahs, albeit of a more reserved variety. Several other arriving VIPs go relatively unnoticed, even though their presence speaks volumes about the prospects for Spring Breakers. Roberta Hanley of Muse Productions, one of the film's producers, makes a striking entrance in a neon-green coat, while another vehicle delivers Megan Ellison, the film producer whose Annapurna Pictures partnered with A24 Films to put out Spring Breakers. Ellison, producer of Zero Dark Thirty and daughter of Oracle co-founder and CEO Larry Ellison (the third-wealthiest American), was profiled in a March Vanity Fair piece titled "Heiress at Work," which explored how her wealth and renegade style have made her a major force in film while ruffling feathers among Hollywood's old guard.

Ellison is notoriously tight-lipped with the press, but on the subject of Spring Breakers' director, she's effusive. "He's the greatest," she says at the movie's after-party, attended by the stars and visiting celebrities.

But there's a scene-stealer among all these dignitaries, in part because she's the least known (and hence most surprising) of the movie's glamorous leads. Looking poised and stunning in a one-shoulder flower-print Preen dress, Rachel Korine has attended movie premieres before, but usually as part of a larger ensemble or at her husband's side.

That has changed. With Spring Breakers as her calling card, the lifelong Nashvillian is emerging now as a star on the rise. And early box-office returns and reviews suggest the movie could catapult Harmony Korine to a hitherto unthinkable level of success and acclaim. In Austin, floodlit by iPhones and cameras, the Korines looked like something no less surreal than one of their previous collaborations: a mainstream power couple.

A twisted excursion through the time-honored rite of passage wherein thousands of college students descend upon Florida's beaches for epic bouts of drunken debauchery, Spring Breakers is Harmony Korine's most (first?) commercial film to date. And in terms of getting his scuzzy, dreamlike arthouse visions before a big audience hungry for skin and sensation, it ranks as his most subversive act yet.

The film follows four college coeds hell-bent on getting to Florida for spring break, lack of funds be damned. Bad girls Brit (Benson), Candy (Hudgens) and Cotty (Korine) coax the angelic Faith (Gomez) to join them on the trip, mainly so they can get her money. But when Faith's savings prove meager, the three instigators don ski masks and rob a restaurant, in a bravura one-take sequence that may be the most technically accomplished scene the 40-year-old director has staged yet.

Once in St. Petersburg, the bikini-clad foursome gets sucked into a maelstrom of booze, drugs and flesh, culminating in a hotel-room bacchanalia that lands them in the clink. Unable to pay the fine, they face a few more days in jail — that is, until corn-rowed, grill-toothed wannabe gangsta Alien (Franco) eyes the scantily clad pretties and puts up his easy-earned cash to spring them. Seduced by his stacks of Benjamins and glitzy digs, the girls are drawn into Alien's world, as tensions between their benefactor and his former mentor Archie (rapper Gucci Mane) come to a boil.

Saying much more might risk spoiling plot details, but frankly, it wouldn't matter. Spring Breakers may be the filmmaker's most narrative-driven film to date, but that's a relative assessment. As in all his films, narrative is beside the point: Korine's creations have always been about mood, strange energy and weird moments — clip reels of confrontational incidents that threaten (or promise) to go way past comfort. Picking plot holes and subtracting points for implausibility are kind of like criticizing Jackson Pollock's art for being too nonrepresentational.

"The film is not even trying to say one thing in particular," Korine tells the Scene. "It's more a kind of feeling. I wanted the movie to be closer to something that was almost like a drug experience. Something with a peak, a kind of physicality and a transcendence. I always want my movies to be in some ways post-articulation, in that I'm going for something that's more like a physical response."

As usual, he's having no trouble getting a response. Some early reviewers, The New Yorker's Richard Brody among them, have assailed the movie's racial dynamics. "The very mainspring of the movie is his stereotypical and reductive view of black life as one of drug dealing and gang violence," Brody writes.

Another looming controversy is whether Spring Breakers is just as exploitative as the trashy Girls Gone Wild milieu it appears to parody. The film shows dozens of topless women, reducing some of them to disembodied jiggling breasts in seemingly eternal slow motion. You can almost hear Korine in carny-geek mode taunting the viewer — "You wanted boobs, right? What's the matter, too much for ya?" — and some early reviewers have taken the bait.

But what's so seductive about the scene (and the whole movie, for that matter) isn't the bare flesh but the sun-soaked, candy-colored pipe dream of uninhibited excess and indulgence it represents. The promise of spring break is conspicuous consumption and endless summer; the reality the movie presents is frat douches faux-peeing from waist-high beer cans into coeds' mouths — a mess left for somebody lower on the economic ladder to clean up. (Of course, if you're into that kind of thing, here's the must-see movie of 2013.)

The result is a fever dream that Korine gradually morphs into a bad trip. By the movie's end, its oft-chanted refrain — "Spring break forever!" — sounds more like a curse than a rallying cry, like a crunk single's hedonistic fervor warping under an unforgiving sun. Much of the credit goes to cinematographer Benoît Debie, who did stunning work in films by Korine's pal and fellow provocateur Gaspar Noé (who showed up at The Belcourt for Korine's Trash Humpers premiere). In a movie that marks a newfound command of cinematic choreography for Korine, it's the Miami Vice-worthy interaction of sunlight and color that stand out.

"I wanted the movie to seem like it was lit with Skittles and Juicy Fruit," Korine says.

The sundazed drugginess extends to the score by film composer Cliff Martinez and electronic music artist Skrillex. The two musicians wrote a fair bit of new material for the film, but it's Skrillex's 2010 hit "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" (a fitting subtitle for the film), wedded to the beach party freakout, that proves most affecting. Korine's cut to slow-motion footage of dudes grabbing their crotches and other rites of collegiate grotesquerie, just as the song's angelic Auto-Tuned vocals give way to the oscillating voice-of-Satan dub bass, is the point where exploitation and art become inseparable.

Korine says he was trying to emulate certain aspects of electronic dance music. Snippets of phone calls and dialogue recur throughout the movie like loops or mantras. Even the editing has a serpentine two-steps-forward-one-step-back momentum that mimics the unstuck-in-time sensations of acid or Ecstasy.

"I was thinking about the movie more structurally in terms of pop music and choruses," Korine says. "The film is made with these micro-scenes, quick scenes that repeat in a loop, almost like loop-based electronic music. I wanted the audio, the phone calls and things, to almost serve as a hook or a chorus."

[page]

A great deal has been made of how Spring Breakers will affect Gomez and Hudgens' careers, with a fair bit of finger-wagging at both the women (purportedly for sullying their reputations and devaluing their stock) and at Korine (for hoodwinking these naive youngsters into his web of depravity). In a March 10 article on the front page of The New York Times arts section titled "Gosh, We're Bad Now!," Jon Caramanica casts the women as fallen teen idols and questions the wisdom of their decision to take part in the film.

From watching the movie, though, it's easy to see why the stars signed on: the chance to escape pigeonholing, and maybe recall what it means to feel surprise making a movie. Shedding every last vestige of his pretty-boy demeanor, Franco transforms into a hilariously cheesy low-rent thug, frontin' and stuntin' as he tries to lure the girls into his world. One of the film's funniest scenes features Alien showing off his guns, money and dark tanning oil, ranting about the American Dream like Gatsby gone gangsta. Another, in which he sits at his poolside piano and regales the girls with Britney Spears' "Everytime," may be the ultimate distillation of Korine's oeuvre: the point where irony, sincerity, garishness and beauty dissolve into a moment of inexplicable enchantment.

Though Gomez's participation in the project raised a lot of eyebrows, the role is hardly a stretch for the actor, as Faith's name pretty much sums up her character. Still, she handles it well — her terror and fragility are palpable as she fends off Alien's repulsive advances. (Like much else about the movie, its attitude toward religion is more ambiguous than you might expect; pro wrestler and Hendersonville resident Jeff Jarrett is terrific in a brief role as Faith's youth group pastor.) As Candy and Brit, Hudgens and Benson make a convincing pair of unrepentant bad girls. Their characters are almost interchangeable, though that may be by design — as if buying into the forced gaiety of spring break robbed the girls of individuality.

For all the talk about the impact the film will have on the Disney stars, though, it stands to do even more for their lesser-known co-star. This isn't Rachel Korine's first appearance in one of her husband's films: She was in 2007's Mister Lonely, 2009's Trash Humpers and last year's short film The Lotus Community Workshop, shot at a Nashville roller rink with Val Kilmer. But it's certainly her most visible, in terms of both screen time and profile.

As Cotty, Korine delivers the most nuanced performance of the four female leads. Where the other three roles are fairly two-dimensional archetypes, Cotty stands out as a pouty, pink-haired, gum-popping Lolita who's eager for trouble until it comes. It's a quality Korine brandishes to chilling effect in the film's most unsettling scene, in which Cotty cavorts with a cadre of creepy dudes in jockstraps who snort drugs off her naked torso. One tries to get it on with her as she mocks and torments him, calling him a "little bitch." The sense of sexually charged menace and impending violence is close to unbearable.

"That was the scene I was the most nervous about," Rachel says. "Obviously I had to kiss the guy, and I didn't know what that was going to be like. That was very uncomfortable in the beginning, but it was amazing once we got in there and [Harmony] called 'Action.' It's like it was another person. I don't even really have any memory of doing it."

As for her topless scenes, she's remarkably unfazed. "No, surprisingly, I was pretty comfortable doing it," she says. "I don't know if it was because it was Harmony directing, and I obviously feel safe doing anything he asks of me, but it didn't seem like a big deal to me."

But there's more to Rachel Korine's portrayal than exhibitionism. Even as Cotty participates in the spring break mayhem, she is somehow detached from it. Take the robbery scene, for example — Brit and Candy are the rampaging burglars, Faith has no knowledge of the crime, and Cotty, circling the restaurant in the getaway car, is in her own world, silently taking everything in. Korine, brandishing a mischievous twinkle in her eyes, imbues the character with a certain mystery and aloofness, a fragile mix of daring and vulnerability.

"She's like a vicious angel," Harmony Korine says of her performance.

It doesn't hurt that her appearance is more compelling than the more traditional Hollywood glamour ideal. Between her porcelain-doll complexion, gentle features and faraway eyes, she possesses the kind of beauty that makes it seem like she's always being rendered in soft focus. And yet she gravitates toward the kind of uninhibited roles that have made cult favorites of Charlotte Gainsbourg or Asia Argento. She's a surprise to the film's early viewers too.

"I thought she was excellent," says Jacob Pepper, an art director at advertising giant Draftfcb's San Francisco office. Pepper and co-worker Jeremy Arth, a senior producer at the agency, caught the film in Austin while attending SXSW's Interactive tech conference. "She was the most believable of the girls. She was exciting to watch. I was surprised that she was the best one of the four."

Arth agrees. "I thought she was incredible," he says. "She completely made herself vulnerable, and totally put herself out there, which is what you need if you want to get pulled into that story."

Filmmaker Michael Tully directed Rachel Korine in his Nashville-shot movie Septien, which premiered in 2011 at Sundance. An offbeat Southern Gothic dramedy about a recalcitrant, gas-huffing former high school football star who suddenly reunites with his two oddball brothers after an unexplained 18-year absence, the film still airs on IFC and Sundance Channel. She plays Savannah, the mysterious companion of a sinister plumber who's 50 or so years her senior.

"Rachel's on-screen presence is pure and effortless in a way that can't be taught," says Tully, the only filmmaker besides Harmony Korine who's directed her in a feature-length movie. "When we shot our film, it was as if she wasn't even acting. She just was. She has that intuitive gift you pray for when you set out to cast a movie. It's like what Altman said: 85 percent of directing is casting."

Septien wasn't Rachel Korine's first appearance at Sundance. She played one of two Mennonite sisters in Nashville filmmaker and artist Brent Stewart's short film "The Dirty Ones," which screened at Sundance in 2009.

"She's got a lot of raw natural talent, and is very easy to direct," Stewart says. "And she gets really passionate about the project."

Rachel was all of 9 years old when Harmony first rose to notoriety as the screenwriter of Larry Clark's scandalous 1995 film Kids. And it was only 10 or so years ago, while Rachel was still in high school, that she got her first peek at her husband's twisted oeuvre — the operative word being "peek." Her introduction was Harmony's polarizing 1997 directorial debut Gummo, an uncompromising and utterly original freak show of white-trash nihilism.

"My parents were pretty strict," says Rachel, who turns 27 in April. "I rented Gummo from Blockbuster and waited till my dad had gone to sleep. And so I snuck into the living room and put it in. I think it was the scene where the girls were jumping on the bed and had X's on their boobies. And all of the sudden I turn around and see my dad is looking through the door. When that scene came on, he stormed in and grabbed it out of the DVD player. He said, 'This is not wholesome,' and sent me to bed. He wouldn't let me watch it."

It was through Brent Stewart that Harmony first met Rachel. Stewart's wife, Diana, had known her since she was 11 or so. One day, the Stewarts were visiting with Rachel when Diana suggested someone should put her in a music video.

"I think it was like eight years ago," Harmony says. "She was much younger than me. Brent called me up and said, 'Hey, you should meet this girl. She's special.' "

Harmony had recently moved back to Nashville, and was focusing on getting his life back on track after some seriously drugged-out years in New York. He headed over to the Stewarts' apartment.

"I thought she was soooo beautiful," Harmony says, recalling the first time he saw Rachel. "I was like, 'Whoa! This is crazy.' " Before long, Harmony cast her in his video for Bonnie Prince Billy's "No More Workhorse Blues." Already, he knew he was interested in more than a professional relationship.

"I think I tried to take her out or something," Harmony says, "and her mom called me up and was like, 'What's your intention with my daughter?' And I said, 'I think she has star potential.' " He laughs, realizing how he must have sounded.

"And I really meant it. And then her mom hung up on me." More cackles.

"I was just awkward," he continues. "And I was just getting my own life back together. ... But she really wasn't interested in me at that point."

So what exactly was it that Harmony saw in Rachel that made him persist?

"She just had this way about her," he says. "And I liked that she was really kind of ... how can I say it ... she was really beautiful, but she also had some good ghetto tendencies. She would just, like, eat Cheetos and drink beer. And it's kind of what I'd been looking for my whole life."

Stewart, who shot and edited the Bonnie Prince Billy video, offers his own insight into the romance. "Rachel drove a big white Cadillac with a glovebox full of plates and silverware," he says, "which was right up Harmony's alley."

The couple married in 2007. They have a 4-year-old daughter, Lefty Bell Korine.

During a photo shoot at Fort Houston, a creative cooperative near Greer Stadium, Harmony and Rachel are clearly buzzing after their recent jaunt around Europe. On his iPhone, Harmony shows me photos of two French magazines featuring Spring Breakers on the cover — popular cultural magazine Les Inrockuptibles and Cahiers du Cinéma, one of the most influential film magazines in the world.

Meanwhile, the woman of the hour poses for the camera in jeans and a pink bikini top. Rachel is far more modest than her alter ego Cotty, and it takes her a couple of minutes to feel comfortable surrounded by strangers. But once she's had a couple of minutes to warm up, she's working it, flashing a faint but impish grin, like a naughty Mona Lisa.

An onlooker suggests she flip off the camera for a few shots. She goes along with it, middle finger extended out toward the camera, then playfully teasing her lips. The possibility of putting one of these shots on the cover gets discussed.

"That's going to go over really well at Lefty's school," Rachel says.

Next, it's time to photograph the couple together. Rachel is visibly relieved to slip on her Simpsons T-shirt. Meanwhile, Harmony — ever the beacon of convention and propriety — puts on a Tupac sweatshirt.

"It's meant for a size triple-extra-schlub," he says in his best Borscht Belt patter. "You could fit, like, two dudes in here. This is definitely my look."

As the photographer packs up, Rachel shares an amusing story about her first interaction with Selena Gomez. Upon reading the script, Gomez was so interested that she wanted to fly to Nashville the next day, mother in tow, to audition at the Korines' old house on Belmont — which featured an extensive collection of some of the edgiest and most provocative artwork and photography you're likely to see in Nashville.

"We really, really wanted her for the role," Rachel says. "So the goal was to not freak her out. We Googled her and found out she was from Texas, and thought, well, they're probably pretty conservative, and with the Disney background. So we immediately took down all of the offensive artwork. Anything with a penis on it, anything like that. And then I spent about 20 minutes just sort of prepping Harmony, telling him, 'Shake her mother's hand. Look her in the eyes. Proper manners.' "

When the next day arrived, Rachel put on her sweetest little sun dress, and the couple tried be prim and proper as they greeted their visitors.

"And the first thing Selena said was that they had just watched Trash Humpers the night before, and they loved it," Rachel says. "So we took a deep breath."

[page]

The last few weeks have been a blur for both the Korines, but especially for Rachel. The hubbub at SXSW was nothing compared to the Spring Breakers premieres in Paris, Rome, Berlin and Madrid just a couple weeks earlier. One YouTube clip from Paris shows a phalanx of security guards guiding the cast through the masses to the barricaded runway. Gomez, Hudgens and Benson are clearly the big draws, the energy surging as the crowd first spots them.

Then Rachel comes into view. Stopped for autographs and snapshots, she poses with fans while husband Harmony, a connoisseur of chaos, records the mayhem on his iPhone with an amused grin. Amid the barrage of "Selena!" and "Vanessa!" a couple of "Rachel!"s rise above the din.

"Everyone has been joking about how it's a lot different from Trash Humpers," Rachel says. She's referring to the 2009 Toronto premiere for Harmony's last feature-length movie, a Nashville-shot faux-found-footage artifact about a gang of elderly weirdos who molest dumpsters and indulge in a cornucopia of depraved absurdity. (Oddly enough, the film won the grand jury prize at the 2009 Copenhagen International Documentary Festival.)

"Harmony and I had to walk, like, 10 miles to get to the screening," Rachel says of the Toronto premiere.

"We were staying in a crack den," Harmony adds, laughing.

Not so on the Spring Breakers tour. The director and cast were flown around Europe in a private jet and stayed at fancy hotels. Harmony Korine cues up video of Gomez, Hudgens, Benson and his wife on the jet, singing and generally carrying on. He's well aware the women are the main reason for the hoopla surrounding the project, and acknowledges that was a motivation in casting them. But even if he's not the center of attention, he's enjoying the media circus.

"It seems like stepping into some kind of teen fantasy," he says. "The energy and chaos around the actors, the fanaticism, is something I've never experienced before. ... The funny thing is, [the fans] didn't want to have anything to do with me. I was just like the security, walking around. I would sign some autographs, and I'd get nudged in the head."

He pauses, then does his best teenage-girl voice: "Where are the four girls?!"

Since the Austin screening, major-outlet reviews have been pouring in by the boatload — and clearly, Korine has lost none of his ability to divide critics. "Trash Humpers at least had the artistic courage of its own lunatic convictions," writes Time's Richard Corliss, "but Spring Breakers is all surface and sham; it's trash about humpers." Meanwhile, The Village Voice's Scott Foundas writes, "Spring Breakers seems to be holding a funhouse mirror up to the face of youth-driven pop culture, leaving us uncertain whether to laugh, recoil in horror, or marvel at its strange beauty. All I knew is I couldn't wait to see it a second time." (Foundas also wins the best headline award: "Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers Are Girls Gone Godard.")

But a couple of things are notably different about the reaction to Spring Breakers compared to response to the filmmaker's other works. For one, a clear majority of the reviews skew positive. But more significantly, the volume of the dialogue is exponentially louder than ever before. The sense of momentum behind the film is, quite frankly, astonishing, and it's caught even Korine off guard.

The day of the SXSW screening, Korine and James Franco were guests on a packed-to-the-rafters live recording of Marc Maron's WTF! podcast. The screening itself was swamped. At the panel the day after, several hundred people showed up.

But the point was driven home this past Sunday, when industry trades reported the highlights from the weekend's box office. The big news wasn't so much that Franco's family-friendlier project of the moment — Sam Raimi's $200 million Disney production Oz the Great and Powerful — had retained its first-place spot. Instead, observers were agog that Spring Breakers' limited release on three screens in New York and L.A. netted nearly $270,000. Not only did its per-screen average of nearly $90,000 smash the existing record for this period, Variety reported, it outperformed the opening-weekend averages of Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty.

Reached shortly after the Variety story hit the Web, Harmony was both ecstatic and exhausted. "I haven't stopped," he says. "I'm so spent. After Austin, I went to New York and L.A. They had to cart me around in a wheelbarrow. We just flew back this morning. Rachel and I just basically collapsed at the door."

As of a week ago, the film was slated to open in 550 theaters. Since the box office numbers came in Sunday, Korine says the release has been bumped up to more than 1,000 theaters. His widest release before Spring Breakers? "I think 60 to 80," he wrote in an email early Monday morning.

As for the question of whether Spring Breakers is just more of the crass excess it is purportedly critiquing, The New York Times' Manohla Dargis had perhaps the most concise response: "That Mr. Korine appears to be having it both (or many) ways may seem like a cop-out, but only if you believe that the role of the artist is to be a didact or a scold. Mr. Korine, on the other hand, embraces the role of court jester, the fool whose transgressive laughter carries corrosive truth. He laughs, you howl."

This from the paper that called Gummo "the worst film of the year."

What's next for Harmony and Rachel is unclear. On the strength of her performance in Spring Breakers, Rachel has been attracting attention, and now has an agent at CAA. She says she's already been sent a few scripts, and there are a couple of projects she's interested in, but she's keeping her cards close to her vest for now.

Harmony, meanwhile, says he's been sitting in his basement making artwork. "I'm trying to make things that look like somebody who'd been partially lobotomized made," he says. "If you can imagine somebody with some type of head wound, and one finger."

Asked if that's the aesthetic he's going for, he responds, "No, that's not what I'm going for. That's only what I'm capable of."

What might be most surprising, especially for longtime fans, is just how much the notorious arthouse provocateur relishes the prospect of mainstream success. "I always wanted my films to come out in the most commercial way possible," he said at the photo shoot. "And I thought every one of them would be playing in a mall and be on a double bill with, like, Shawshank Redemption or some shit."

Even Trash Humpers?

"Yeah, of course! I thought it was something that would appeal to the tween set."

On the phone Sunday, he's nearly breathless as he sees that carrot dangling ever so close to his grasp. "Do you believe this shit?" he says. "It's all a dream. I can't believe it! Usually, I make these movies, and I'm alone in the dark for years and years. You just never know what's going to happen, if people are going to react, or even notice."

People are definitely noticing this time. And as for the naysayers, Alien's gangster-mystic mantra may best sum up the director's sentiments:

Spring break forever, bitches!

Email editor@nashvillescene.com.