Harmony
Korine’s AGGRO DR1FT
Friday, May 17th at 9:40pm
& Saturday, May 18th at 9:40 PM
$16 Public |
$10 Members
More than a
decade after Spring Breakers, Harmony Korine (Julien
Donkey-Boy, Trash Humpers, Gummo) returns with an even more
hallucinatory trance film, and perhaps his most formally unbound work.
Interpolating much of the artist’s patented proclivities with a radically
chimeric visual style — achieved through spellbinding infrared photography and
phantasmagoric animation — the film orbits around a melancholic assassin named
BO (Jordi Mollà) as he prepares to vanquish a demonic crime lord in a
Floridian realm of vivid pinks, blazing yellows, and deep purples. But the
particulars of its minimalist plot are largely moot; the vibe is what’s
paramount.
Enveloped by
an extraordinary electronic score by AraabMuzik, Korine conjures a
parade of arresting imagery that seems to emulate and interrogate contemporary
genre clichés, while sincerely mining profound poetry from platitudes on
violence and love. BO’s elliptical traversals through Miami, which take on
mythical dimension, aesthetically recall the perverse spheres of crime-ridden
videogames like Grand Theft Auto, and its inhabitants (which include
rapper Travis Scott as a literal snake-tongued militia leader) recite
and repeat dialogue with the amusing dissonance of the hasty dubbing of a
non-playable character. The assassin himself is haunted by the spectre of an
enormous computer-generated demon, which synchronously manifests alongside him
as if his life were bound by the algorithmic rules of a simulation.
In what is
at once a hallucinatory pastiche and an elegiac reflection of a chaotic world,
Korine probes a new aesthetic frontier that finds a mesmerizing magic to its
brutality. (USA, 2023, 80 min., color, DCP)
