VENICE, Italy—For his latest trick—a crime revenge drama set in Miami’s criminal underworld—the arch-provocateur that is Harmony Korine (Spring Breakers) has made, in his own words, a “vibe-based” film, principally shot with thermal infrared technology. Of this movie, Aggro Dr1ft, in which the characters say things like, “The violence is magnetic… I can’t take my eyes off it” and “Dance, bitch, dance. Dance. Dance. Dance, bitch, dance bitch,” Korine has this to say: “We didn’t use a conventional script and there was no written dialogue, just ideas and a basic story.” Oh word?
What story there is in Aggro Dr1ft, which premiered Friday at the Venice Film Festival, centers on a hitman (Jordi Mollà, grunting in a way that makes Tom Hardy’s Bane sound like Audrey Hepburn) who is in relentless, bloodthirsty pursuit of his mark, a man called Zion (Travis Scott). In an inspired piece of characterization, Bo is a sexist, toxic pig who keeps women locked in cages, whereas Zion is a family guy with a wife whose Brazilian Butt Lift is so huge that it causes a bend in the spacetime continuum. What truly different men these are, fighting one another and opining, with various female figures stretching anonymously in the background, rubbing themselves on bed linen and so on!
Clearly, Korine was not interested in normal storytelling here, which must have been exciting for him as a creator but may prove a bit more problematic for the average spectator. Aggro Dr1ft—just writing the title out can obliterate up to 50 brain cells!—is intended as an experience. It certainly is that. (At least for those who stayed; there was a flurry of walkouts at its Venice premiere.)
It’s difficult to convey what a relentless, thoughtless barrage of loudness Aggro Dr1ft represents, between the belligerent score by Araabmusik and the hot pinks, reds, and oranges of Korine’s heat-cam. We are in the domain of the video game or music clip here, even animation, rather than classical drama as derived, largely, from centuries of theater. Korine indulges in image-making of a type that underscores its own artificiality at all times, and sets the audience at a psychological remove: There is nothing really to empathize with, think about, be rendered curious by, or even really to turn us on. What we have instead is a radical formal experiment, which, at its height, indubitably serves up some startling imagery.
In constantly mutating colors, which shift and morph with characters’ movement, Korine films action and location as a sort of dreamscape: The director calls this “liquid narrative,” a bluffly dumb phrase that nevertheless captures something changeable and adaptable about this aesthetic, about this type of (non-)storytelling. There can be real pictorial beauty in some of the images here, where the fronds of Florida palm trees are filmed fringing a warm night sky, and characters appear in declensions of pink—fuchsia, baby, Barbie, hot—that melt into woozy purple and orange, not unlike Gauguin’s more lurid paintings of Tahitian women.
This look has its moments, but then its weaknesses are also as visible as an open wound, at times when the technology shows up how banal the “real” pictures are, how tawdry and thin the compositions, such as a drab shot of a strip club whose colorful veneer leeches off into hideously maudlin grays. And the garish tones that Korine adopts here also begin to pall: find-the-3D-picture books fell out of fashion in the ’90s for a reason, which is that there was only so long you could look at this stuff before getting a headache.
Meanwhile, that score is ceaseless, conjugating crashing piano chords and Hans Zimmer-aping honks: There is no reason for it to let up, because there are no real characters here, only “ideas”—although that’s debatable too. So the score plays insistently over everything, blaring, in a way that underlines the experiential nature of this exercise.
To what extent is the reviewer obligated to appraise a film like this on the ambitions it has set out for itself, and to what extent should that same critic compare this stylistic exercise with other, deeper films? After all, Korine is clearly not interested in psychological verisimilitude, or emotions, or the three-act structure, or the virtues of unobtrusive set decoration: What interests him, and what he largely does here, is toying with the possibilities of new movie-making techniques that reconfigure (for better or worse) what a film might be, for people whose references are not primarily cinematic but derived from the internet, gaming, VR, and other miscellaneous technologies.
That’s fine—although it isn’t really this reviewer’s cup of tea—but by the same token, the film didn’t have to be so crashingly dumb with it. Some small scintillas of wit would be welcome; catching the actors’ tediously repetitive ad libs during the edit might have been salutary. The sheer, proud idiocy of this enterprise, with its crassly misogynistic dictums (aha, but is the film endorsing misogyny or just representing it, we are stupidly invited to wonder) is a lot to take, for just about anybody who made it all the way through school. So too is the teenager-y grandstanding and lazy construction of mythology here: half-assed Tarantino-isms are supposed to signpost some sort of cool legendariness, in the opposition the film draws up between its two men, but that does not obtain. Inspector Javert and Jean Valjean can rest easy.
Korine is a talented and searching filmmaker, but Aggro Dr1ft—there go 50 more—finds him choosing a side in the battle for the future of film, alongside creators whose interest in technology supersedes their interest in the human. That is his choice, but it doesn’t have to be yours.
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