The Bling Ring | Little White Lies

The Bling Ring

04 Jul 2013 / Released: 05 Jul 2013

Woman in fur-trimmed jacket, applying lip colour, sitting in a chair with a zebra-print cushion.
Woman in fur-trimmed jacket, applying lip colour, sitting in a chair with a zebra-print cushion.
2

Anticipation.

From the outset, this looks as if Coppola has taken a turn for the slight.

4

Enjoyment.

It takes a while to come together, but this is clearly Coppola’s best film.

4

In Retrospect.

A film about teenagers, crime, celebrity, LA, the internet and the cinema. These still waters run very deep indeed.

Heists and high-fash­ion coa­lesce in Sofia Coppola’s sub­tle and intri­cate take on teen bore­dom and vic­tim­less crime.

Try to imag­ine the pro­tag­o­nists of a Jean-Pierre Melville thriller sit­ting down to watch Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring. It would only take a few frames for them to be qui­et­ly weep­ing under their Hom­burgs as the painstak­ing art of safe­crack­ing and jew­el theft is ren­dered utter­ly obso­lete. In the heist movies of yore, weeks, months, even years, would’ve been ded­i­cat­ed to prep­ping – phys­i­cal­ly and psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly – for these assid­u­ous, must-win capers. Yet Cop­po­la invites us to a world in which rob­bery is some­thing you slot in between Frap­puc­ci­nos. It was a pro­fes­sion. Now it’s a sport.

Based on Nan­cy Jo Sayles’ juicy Van­i­ty Fair lon­gread enti­tled The Sus­pects Wore Louboutins’, The Bling Ring is a scin­til­lat­ing and snap­py true crime saga that descends part­ly from the tra­di­tion of Tru­man Capote’s In Cold Blood’, and part­ly from Ken­neth Anger’s tit­tle-tat­tle scan­dal com­pendi­um, Hol­ly­wood Baby­lon’. Mix in the usu­al dash of Felli­ni, some Sex And The City and even a bit of Spring Break­ers, and you’re almost there. The film it’s most sim­i­lar to is Gus Van Sant’s Para­noid Park, par­tic­u­lar­ly in its glassy-eyed view of mod­ern teen disillusionment.

It tells of a group of afflu­ent, hedo­nis­tic LA teens who one evening notice that soci­ety heiress Paris Hilton is out of town host­ing a par­ty. So they find her address online and then pro­ceed to loot her house. They cher­ry pick the best gear and assuage their (very mild) guilt by remind­ing them­selves that Hilton has far too much swag to notice the odd miss­ing pair of fluffy-cuffs. And besides, she leaves her keys under the door­mat, so she’s essen­tial­ly ask­ing for it.

The film is ded­i­cat­ed to cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Har­ris Savides who died dur­ing pro­duc­tion and was replaced by Christo­pher Blau­velt. Yet Savides’ dis­tinc­tive visu­al for­mu­la­tions and exact­ing exper­i­ments with light and fram­ing remain. One par­tic­u­lar­ly impres­sive set piece chron­i­cles a twi­light rob­bery in a sin­gle creep­ing long shot allow­ing us to mon­i­tor the move­ments of the char­ac­ters through the glass and steel façade of this orna­men­tal struc­ture. The film’s most haunt­ing moment arrives via a slo-mo por­trait of qua­si-psy­chot­ic ring­leader Rebec­ca (Katie Chang) as she gleams blankly into a mir­ror while mod­el­ling a pair of over­sized sun-glasses.

Israel Broussard’s Marc is the lone male of the gang, and though it ini­tial­ly appears that he falls into this clique sim­ply as a way to make friends, Cop­po­la con­notes his behav­iour as being a lit­tle fruity. He lies on his bed in neon orange stilet­tos while spend­ing much of his down­time image-con­sult­ing for tramp-stamped har­ri­dan Nic­ki (Emma Wat­son) and her sis­ter Sam (Tais­sa Farmi­ga). The per­for­mances here are not what you’d call world-beat­ing, but they’re strong enough to car­ry Coppola’s mes­sage of discontent.

Coppolas greatest coup is making it look as if both robbers and victims are guilty of the same lack of discrimination.

What begins as a play­ful stunt turns into a nasty habit, much like the drugs the gang begin to hoover up as their haul increas­es expo­nen­tial­ly. More peo­ple tag along, des­per­ate to con­firm the social media boasts of their ever-more á la mode com­padres. Their stings are the pin­na­cle of unpro­fes­sion­al fol­ly and their even­tu­al cap­ture a mere for­mal­i­ty. They com­pare their deeds to those of Bon­nie and Clyde, which makes a strange kind of sense: youth rebel­lion, motive­less crime and the much-vaunt­ed celebri­ty sta­tus that neat­ly binds every­thing together.

Much of the first half of the film is spent pon­der­ing Coppola’s rea­son for mak­ing a film out of this mate­r­i­al, as she offers a sum­ma­ry of all the key motifs, char­ac­ters and hints at the dénoue­ment with­in the first three min­utes. But the longer it goes on, the rich­er and more unten­able it becomes. By the end, there’s the feel­ing we’ve seen Coppola’s most ful­ly round­ed, ambigu­ous and cau­tious­ly empa­thet­ic film. The Van­i­ty Fair arti­cle was just a jump­ing-off point for the writer/director’s own quest to dis­cov­er where juve­nile delin­quen­cy ends and celebri­ty begins.

It’s key to the sto­ry that the Bling Ring (as they become known) only tar­get celebri­ties, sug­gest­ing that they’re in it as much to bask in the flash­bulb lus­tre of their tabloid heroes as they are for the rabid mate­ri­al­ism. But it’s made clear that these noc­tur­nal pur­suits are the prod­uct of a moral void in these kids’ lives and that they’re choos­ing to car­ry out these raids rather than slouch­ing on a bed click­ing refresh on Face­book. A full-scale mul­ti­me­dia immer­sion with­in the cul­ture of celebri­ty, Cop­po­la says, is the trag­ic con­se­quence of the fact that stim­u­la­tion is cheap and young peo­ple sim­ply have noth­ing else to do.

Yet even though no actu­al celebri­ties phys­i­cal­ly fea­ture beyond pap mon­tages and split-sec­ond cameos, this film says as much about their lives as it does its teeny­bop­per assailants. In Some­where, Marie Antoinette and Lost in Trans­la­tion, Cop­po­la exam­ined the banal­i­ty of life where mate­r­i­al desire – the idea of work­ing hard towards a goal – had lost all mean­ing. Here, the celebri­ty man­sions encap­su­late the chasm between cost and val­ue, the sparkling mer­chan­dise is left for the wily and auda­cious to hoard. Peo­ple don’t buy trin­kets because they want a trin­ket, they want to expe­ri­ence the thrill of the trans­ac­tion. Coppola’s great­est coup here is mak­ing it look as if both rob­bers and vic­tims are guilty of the same lack of discrimination.

And yet the cus­tom­ary Cop­po­la cyn­i­cism is deliv­ered by stealth rather than via the usu­al full-frontal attack. Her films have often zeroed in on char­ac­ters who are acute­ly aware of the venal­i­ty of celebri­ty cul­ture, but here the char­ac­ters are utter­ly and sin­cere­ly in thrall to these myth­i­cal crea­tures. Via a clever jug­gling of con­texts in its clos­ing scenes, Cop­po­la man­ages to frame these events as a strange ouroboros cycle that inci­sive­ly nails what it means to be famous. That tar­gets such as Lind­say Lohan and Paris Hilton them­selves remain in the head­lines due to their own dal­liances with law­break­ing is the film’s final great irony.

You might like

Accessibility Settings

Text

Applies the Open Dyslexic font, designed to improve readability for individuals with dyslexia.

Applies a more readable font throughout the website, improving readability.

Underlines links throughout the website, making them easier to distinguish.

Adjusts the font size for improved readability.

Visuals

Reduces animations and disables autoplaying videos across the website, reducing distractions and improving focus.

Reduces the colour saturation throughout the website to create a more soothing visual experience.

Increases the contrast of elements on the website, making text and interface elements easier to distinguish.