The Cannes Film Festival boasts of its boos and cheers, but the reactions at the competition in Venice are more solemn. My thesis: that disastrous food supply on Festival Island was deliberately designed to be low in vitamins (excerpt from the menu: oblong roll, square roll, circular roll, Aperol Spritz). So over the course of 10 days, the critics are dumbed down so that they willlessly swallow the poor films at the end of the festival.
Before I get off topic due to my carb-induced brain melt, Spring Breakers director Harmony Korine has a new film starring the cool Title Aggro Dr1ft shot. On the Croisette he would have drifted into the credits between ecstatic boos and counter-jubilation. In Venice, people voted less verbally and more archaically: with their feet.
In the first half hour of my press screening of Aggro Dr1ft, tons of spectators left the hall; we hear that similar things happened at other screenings. So is Aggro Dr1ft the unbearable provocation that such reactions promise?
Aggro Dr1ft’s look creates an extraordinary rush of color
The story reads as flat as a flounder: The best contract killer in the world (he says (very often)) goes about his daily work in Miami and worries about his wife and children at home. To break free from the murderous rut, he has to kill a monstrous boss/final boss.
The fluorescent look is spectacular because Aggro Dr1ft was recorded with thermal imaging cameras. Every scene shines in the hunting colors of the Predator perspective. Instead of faces, expressionless shapes waft through the picture, and instead of eyes, bluish ice crystals stare emptyly through the vaporwave nights of Miami. Aggro Dr1ft is a bombastic riot of colorwhich feels, if not revolutionary, at least more rebellious and challenging than most of what you see in standard cinemas.
EDGLRD
Aggro Dr1ft
I can’t say the colors will keep you entertained for 80 minutes, but they’re a big part of the appeal of Harmony Korine’s new film. When it comes to narration, Korine treats his audience like one transplanted limb that he intends to reject.
The action nightmare doesn’t make things easy for its audience
What drove some in the audience to flee was probably not the look, but the platitudes about being a killer that were put into the mouth of the main actor, Jordi Mollà. The Pathetically inflated drivel is repeated like a prayer wheel in Aggro Dr1ft, until all that remains of the meaning is the monotonous speech melody on the soundtrack. This doesn’t exactly help with staying awake (I struggled with my heavy eyelids during the late show).
On the other hand, Aggro Dr1ft develops its own humor through the mantras, the gangsta posing and the fact that 90 percent of the characters behave like GTA NPCs. Anyone who takes what is happening here seriously deserves an early escape from the cinema.
Korine creates one through and through using the means of video games, cinema and music videos clichéd excess of violence, who laughs at himself with every dramatic breath. In this respect, the film is similar to another over-stylized Florida underworld story: Brian De Palma’s Scarface.
Tiresome and exciting, Aggro Dr1ft is far too serious and hilarious, a perverted church service with Travis Scott as an altar boy and an Uzi on the altar. This 80-minute experience has to be endured at least once, at least if you view film as more than just a conveyor belt of stories. Is this the future of the medium? Who cares, it’s a sign of life.