SXSW: Trance & Spring Breakers
While SXSW is all about catching up with the latest trends how could one know that one of the prominent launches of a website at this year’s SXSW 2024 edition would be the reboot of – drum roll, applause – MySpace.com. On the closing weekend of SXSW MySpace was offering up a concert headlining Justin Timberlake. Okay, I will bite at the bit. I logged on and was offered Classic MySpace or New MySpace. When did social media become the cola wars?
But it’s not a carbonated world anymore, well attested by the many free scooby snacks like frozen Kiefer treats or the Zico coconut water being handed out on streets surrounding the Austin Convention Center. One of my favorite moments was when I walked past a busking musician with his dog snuggled tightly in his nearby guitar case somewhere along 6th Street.
Inside the convention center were multitudes of panels and seminars. One particularly insightful seminar was in the manner of a Q&A where Danny Boyle introduced a segment of his upcoming film Trance. Only the sequence appeared to be a major spoiler with a scene depicting a life or death struggle between James McAvoy, Rosario Dawson, and Vincent Cassel. Boyle explained to the crowd how when they actually see the entire film a phenomenon of amnesia would take place (in this and all films) where they wouldn’t even think about the scene just watched until it occurred in the movie.
Since Trance deals with hypnotism Boyle also noted that only about ten-percent of any given crowd is susceptible to mesmerism. Boyle likened going to the cinema with going to a church. “You go into this dark place and secrets are revealed.” Boyle, being interviewed during the seminar by David Carr (writer for the New York Times) talked frankly about his career as well as his use of electronic music in his films; the fact that he turned down a knighthood; and how he occasionally lost his temper when he was artistic director of the 2024 Olympic Games in London. Although the clip for Trance was only about ten-minutes long it left me wanting and waiting for more (Trance opens in the US in April.)
Another Q&A style event took place on Monday with Harmony Korine and femme members of the cast of Spring Breakers, a film that will mark the largest opening of a Korine film. Even so it’s not likely to skew the same audience that grew up on Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens Disney movies. SB was made to appeal to an art house crowd who celebrate movies that are tone poems with very little dialogue, and what dialogue there is seems to be the same phrases repeated over and over. Korine has made a film that mocks porn imagery even while titillating viewers with ersatz sex scenes, most notably simulated fellatio with a gun barrel. One scene of a robbery places the camera inside a car circling a restaurant while two of girls are inside robbing it, and certainly the forced point-of-view of the crime by the driver is as pure as anything seen since Gun Crazy. That being said, a practically non-existent narrative that consists of the four chicks treading deeper and deeper into a dark criminal underground may turn off even savvy viewers. Then again true movie mavens will marvel at the similarities to French poetic realism of the 20th century like Cocteau’s Blood of the Poet or The Testament of Orpheus. Because Korine is that rare combo of singular artistic temperament and indie filmmaking chops.
Korine noted that he first did research in Daytona but found that that city had driven the spring breakers to Panama City where he proceeded. The film itself was shot in and around Sarasota, all three of those Florida cities as spread out as Houston, Austin and Dallas. One image that caught Korine’s eye during his research was “a human jawbone in a chandelier at a diner.” Rachel Korine, Harmony’s wife talked their home life and it sounded pretty domestic what with a child and making sure the family took their daily vitamin pills. Gomez added that her mother gave her the script and encouraged her to take the role, and that her favorite Korine film was Trash Humpers.
— Michael Bergeron
