Category: A24 Retrospective

A2 – Spring Breakers – An Early Masterpiece

On By LaurenDolceVitaIn A24 RetrospectiveLeave a comment

After the disappointment that was A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III, A24 released the new film by provocateur Harmony Korine in which he cast young women from Disney (or Disney adjacent) young adult TV shows and set them in a nudity filled spring break film that also somehow managed to be a Malickian style arthouse film, and it is a genuine masterpiece.

Spring Breakers stars teenage starlets, Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson, and Vanessa Hudgens as Faith, Brit, and Candy, three college women in desperate need of a break from the monotony of the world, and to experience something new. Along their friend Cotty (played by Rachel Korine, wife of directory Harmony) they rob a restaurant to fund their trip and take off to Florida to partake in the annual debauchery. When the cops crash a party with cocaine that they are at, they are arrested and without sufficient funding to pay the fine forced to spend a few days in jail. However, a local rapper and drug dealer named Alien (James Franco) takes pity on them and pays for their release and then becomes a mentor of sorts to the young women.

Much was made of the casting at the time, and it is impossible to view Spring Breakers without that as context. Teenage stars, especially young women, attempting to shed their child label and be seen as “adult” through partying and self-sexualization was by no means a new concept in 2013, though it was still used as an excuse to attack young women.

Spring Breakers on the surface appears to be another example of that phenomenon, with the assumption being that it would use the three former child stars’ want to be seen as grown and adult to create an exploitative film for the primary purpose of allowing people to leer at them in bikinis for 90 minutes. The opening seconds of the film which includes Girls Gone Wildesque footage scored by Skrillex’s “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” promises such exploitation, but soon the film gives away to ethereal repetition and dreamy, fluid photography which is more at home in an arthouse cinema than an adult theater.

This stylistic approach to filmmaking betrays a level of respect for the subject matter from director Harmony Korine who has made a career from filming communities that are oft derided. His films act almost as an anthropological study of the lives of his characters, and Spring Breakers fits this mold. The spring break spectacle might be a little inherently ridiculous, as is the ritualistic self-sexualization of teenage starlets, but Spring Breakers does not judge these women nor their characters for their actions. Rather it captures these events as a mode of understanding.

Brit (Benson) and Candy (Hutchens) with Alien (Franco)

Brit and Candy in particular are characterized as sex obsessed sharing handwritten notes of wanting penis while failing to pay attention in class. This is a foreshadowing for the most phallic scene of the movie in which the two hold guns near their pelvises and force Alien to filate them turning the power dynamic around. This is an example of Korine seeing the empowerment potential of this rite of passage.

While posters of newly legal child stars in dayglow bikinis brandishing assault rifles in hot pink ski masks may justifiably leave one to believe that A24 would move to zero for two when looking at their films through a feminist lens, Spring Breakers explores the initiation rite of its stars in a nonjudgemental manner. The opaque filmmaking implemented acts as a punishment for any disingenuous potential viewers looking only to ogle at the young women while still allowing the stars to explore their new maturity and autonomy outside of parental and family media conglomerate standards.

A1 – A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III – A Rough Start

On By LaurenDolceVitaIn A24 RetrospectiveLeave a comment

I had never seen A24’s first release, and I knew it wasn’t the owner of the greatest of reviews, but I was not prepared for how rough a start the company got off to.

In the aftermath of his crash out in 2011 in which he lost his role in the extremely successful sitcom Two and a Half Men, Charlie Sheen became a public pariah and was the punchline of countless jokes. It was at this moment that Roman Coppola cast him in his new film A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III which would go on to be A24’s first release. The film played into the Sheen persona of the time in a way that with over a decade of hindsight feels like an edgelord attempting to be controversial but instead playing into tropes that were old even at the time.

Sheen plays the titular Swan, a self-described asshole whose brain is 80% consumed with thoughts of sex as he tries to deal with the reality of losing his girlfriend Ivana (Katheryn Winnick) when his womanizing ways are finally too much for her to put up with. The film plays out as a delusional ego trip by Charlie, as he and his best friend Kirby (Jason Schwartzman) blame women for all their troubles while objectifying them at the same time.

The average outfit for a woman in A24’s first feature

A Glimpse… falls into a common pitfall when viewing film through a critical lens including a feminist one, and that is that the text and subtext do not share a sentiment. While a depiction does not alone equate to condoning something, a film’s cinematic language can be used to determine its point of view. Charlie Swan might be seen as ridiculous and an asshole, but the film still relishes in its objectification and demonization of women. Apart from Patricia Arquette who plays Charlie’s sister, every other woman is shot through Charlie’s viewpoint of someone with exclusively sex on the mind. The film has no interest in exploring what a woman thinks, only what Charlie or Kirby thinks that they are thinking. Any attempts to claim the film thinks that the views of Charlie and Kirby are not what the filmmakers agree with is lost as the film relishes in the misogynistic musings of the two pigheaded men. The film even goes so far as to reward Charlie at the end of the film despite the character learning nothing and failing to grow throughout the length of the film.

Despite relying on a known entity in Roman Coppola and a reliable starting cast (Bill Murray also plays a supporting role), A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III was a rough place for A24 to begin its life in both quality and in its ability to be an improvement in how cinema sees women. Because of these flaws, it makes sense that their second release was the one that people associate with the beginning of the studio.