The Bling Ring

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.

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.