Sophie Coppola is a rather tricky customer. Her film-making has something of the doe-eyed ingenue about it in the sense that she manipulates her storytelling just so to come across as a chronicler rather than a commentator. It’s an important distinction, because all her films – from 1999’s The Virgin Suicides to 2010’s somewhat overlooked Somewhere – are preoccupied, to a greater or lesser degree, with the matter of celebrity. Ms Coppola, of course, is the daughter of the great Francis Ford and spent much of childhood in the public eye (an aside: her first screen role was in The Godfather…as a boy). It’s not fair to judge her work on personal antecedents alone, but equally it’ll be wrong headed to ignore these altogether. Time and again, she returns to the same territory because it is a world that she knows.
All that said, The Bling Ring distinguishes itself from Coppola’s earlier films in one important respect. Her past work is steeped in the ennui and emptiness of the experience of celebrity, the anchor being those up on the pedestal. Now, our gaze is directed elsewhere: towards the “civilians” who normally thrive on celebrity culture, but now want to go beyond the vicarious experience distilled by People and TMZ.com and step up to the plate themselves. The Bling Ring is about the ennui and emptiness of fame; this time though, it’s about the outsider looking in.
Loosely based on Nancy Jo Sale’s Vanity Fair piece, The Suspects Wore Louboutins, The Bling Ring recasts the real-life exploits of a group of young bucks preying on the rich and feckless into a modern morality tale. They’re all kids, as normal or as abnormal as one can be growing up in the shadow of the Hollywood Hills. Their social life is a complex and bewildering assortment of communication by proxy – shared blunts, underage drinking, status updates and pictures on Facebook. They are kids, true, but they seem already afraid of intimacy with themselves. Celebrity culture is a wonderfully effective conduit.
Marc, the newcomer in school, teams up with the preternaturally composed Rebecca (Katie Chang). She’s the head of a loose collective of girls who hang out at late at celebrity bars on school nights and get up to middling mischief. Marc, played with an engaging lack of guile by Israel Broussard, likes what he sees and likes Rebecca even more. It isn’t a romantic thing, more a matter of loyalty and gratitude. She opens doors for him.
Soon, it’s his job to open doors in return. Rebecca just doesn’t want to admire the diamond life from afar, she wants to be it. Given the tendency to live life in the public eye, it isn’t terribly difficult to find out where her favourite celebrities are at any given time – or, to be more precise, where they are not. “Can you find her house for me? Come on, I want some Chanel,” she asks Marc beseechingly. Empty houses laden with celebrity riches make for inviting targets, especially when not particularly well secured. An early target is uber-celebrity Paris Hilton (Hilton lent her house to Coppola for filming key scenes. I’m really not sure what to make of this.) “I bet she keeps her key under the mat,” Rebecca guesses accurately. And before you can say bling, they’re playing dress-up in Miss Hilton’s boudoir.
The pervading sentiment that runs through The Bling Ring is the absence of consequences. The legal complications of trespass and grand larceny scarcely register. Everything seems make-believe, not just their idols, but the lifestyles they admire and the cash and clothes that they liberate. Marc has just about enough of a sense of self preservation to question the wisdom of their house-breaking, at least at first. But he soon gets swept away in the exhilaration of the moment.
Coppola is pretty good at coaxing the everyday out of the ridiculous. Bling-Ringer Nicki (Emma Watson, shaking off the shackles of the Harry Potter films) comes up with some excellent dead-pan lines. When her mother asks her what she admires in Angelina Jolie (part of a character building/home schooling interface), she replies “her hot bod” without missing a beat. Later, she muses on the deeper significance of her crimes: “I’m a firm believer in Karma, and I think this situation was attracted into my life because it was supposed to be a huge lesson for me to grow and expand as a spiritual human being.” Actually, that’s a straight quote, lifted by Coppola from Nikki’s real life counterpart and dropped into the script.
Maybe that’s the thing about Coppola. She has the acquisitive instincts of a magpie, and I don’t mean this in a disparaging sense at all. Her self-penned script has moments of pure silver, revealing snapshots that capture the self-obsessed essence of celebrity culture. The break-ins are about the money, of course. (The original Bling Ring cleared about $3m in stolen goods). But it is also about the lifestyle. And whilst Coppola diligently captures the opulence – some might say decadence – of the moment, she doesn’t really give any sense of context. And it’s here that the film falls down, intriguing parts never adding up to a cohesive whole. Coppola is an auteur, but she’s not quite a story-teller.
All that said, The Bling Ring is entertaining, if ultimately unsatisfying. A superior soundtrack – as ever – mixes Kraut-rock and Bling-rap to excellent effect, shaping a brash, unsubtle but largely convincing tableau. There’s no arguing that Coppola does understand the world of celebrity, and The Bling Ring is a serious attempt to recreate this milieu from an unexpected perspective. But there’s something lacking, nonetheless. I’m not a big fan of remote psychoanalysis – if nothing else, all that the amateur Freudian has at their disposal is what the analysand offers up for public consumption. Even so, I’ll stick my neck out and say that Sophia Coppola has a deep-rooted ambivalence about a world that she knows very well. And in The Bling Ring, this ambivalence shows.
The Bling Ring was the opening film for the Tel Aviv International Student Film Festival 2013, and is currently showing in Israeli theatres.
The Bling Ring (US, 2013, 90 min, English and Valley-Speak with Hebrew subtitles)
Written and directed by Sophie Coppola; cast: Katie Chang, Israel Broussard, Emma Watson and Leslie Mann.
