Sofia Coppola (2013)

In late 2008 through to mid-2009 a series of burglaries took place in Los Angeles.  The homes burgled were in and around the Hollywood Hills and their owners were celebrities, including Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan.   The culprits, who became known as ‘the Bling Ring’, were a group of Californian teenagers.  According to the Wikipedia article on the crimes, the celebrities ‘were targeted due to their being considered fashion icons by members of the group’, whose ringleader Rachel Lee described their thefts as ‘going shopping’.  (It’s therefore no surprise that the burglarised were mostly women – perhaps Orlando Bloom and Brian Austin Green were included only because they shared their homes with Miranda Kerr and Megan Fox respectively.)  The Bling Ring is Sofia Coppola’s retelling of these events; the source for her screenplay is a Vanity Fair article by Nancy Jo Sales (a good surname in the circumstances) called ‘The Suspects Wore Louboutins’.  Sofia Coppola has been criticised for shallowness, for not going below the surface – but what probing is possible in telling this amazing tale of celebrity-consumer culture?   If Coppola had tried to explain the behaviour of all the kids in the story she would have risked weakening the film as a social comedy.   There is a brief explanation, by Marc, the one boy among the five thieves, of his motivation.  This is a strong bit in the film but partly because Marc is somewhat incongruous in the criminal company that he keeps.

The ironies in the material extend well beyond what’s on the screen.  Members of the Bling Ring were up for interviews with Nancy Jo Sales – it was a great opportunity for self-promotion – but scandalised by what she then wrote in Vanity Fair.  Alexis Neiers, the prototype for the character played by Emma Watson in Coppola’s movie, was relatively relaxed about the portrait:  it had no reality since some of Watson’s clothes were, said Neiers, ones she wouldn’t be seen dead in.   A few hours after The Bling Ring was screened at Cannes this year, $1m of jewellery loaned to stars appearing on the red carpet during the Festival was stolen from a hotel room.  Sofia Coppola has changed the names of the originals and has no doubt done some shaping to sharpen the satirical edge of the dialogue but she needs only to describe what happened in order to create a movie that’s both funny and desolating.

The selfish appetency in evidence on the screen is thoroughgoing – and that’s all there is; this must be what worries some critics.   The Bling Ring has so far taken around $20m worldwide (two and a half times its budget).  Do its detractors feel better or worse that box-office success must surely be thanks in no small part to American kids whose moral universe isn’t so different from that of Alexis Neiers and co (and who now presumably see the Bling Ring as part of the celebrity pantheon of which Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan are merely longer-standing members)?    Perhaps critics are worried too that Coppola is artist enough to make you feel the attractive aspects of the thieves’ lives.  The Hollywood Hills look beautiful and almost magical at night.   (The Bling Ring is dedicated to the cinematographer Harris Savides, whose last movie this was before his untimely death in late 2012.)  What the gang do – getting high, drinking, driving, joining in to songs on the car radio – has been nostalgised in other films.  There are moments when you almost wonder if the youthful carelessness The Bling Ring describes might also in time become a suitable case for nostalgic treatment.

The outrageousness of the thefts is moderated too by the impossibility of feeling sorry for the ‘victims’, given their ludicrous surplus of possessions and their crap home security.  I assume it must be true that the thieves were able to Google the celebs’ home addresses and found Paris Hilton’s house key under the doormat.   Although in one sense breathtaking, in another it’s entirely natural that the kids graduate from stealing a bag of the kind they know Hilton owns to stealing her actual bag.  Inside Lindsay Lohan’s home, Rebecca (the Rachel Lee character) applies Chanel as if it were holy water but the gang are not otherwise respectful of what they find in wardrobes or other reliquaries:  they grab what they can.  Their voracious consumerism has the quality of vindictive self-assertion – they’ve as much right to the things they steal as the things’ owners.  The Bling Ring’s capacity for moralising self-justification is amazing.  Even Marc, unconfident and relatively likeable, talks after his arrest about America’s ‘sick fascination with a kind of Bonnie and Clyde thing’.

The four girls – Katie Chang, Claire Julien, Taissa Farmiga and Watson – are all great-looking.  On the evidence of this film, they can all act too – but it gives The Bling Ring an extra charge that they have the looks to succeed without being good actresses, to become celebrities of the Paris Hilton/Lindsay Lohan kind – famous for being famous.  (I keep mentioning these two because I’d never even heard of other burglarees such as Audrina Patridge and Rachel Bilson.)   The cast is just about impeccable.  Israel Broussard plays Marc sensitively and gets across well the boy’s relief at getting into a group and no longer being isolated.  Taissa Farmiga, who has a look of her sister Vera, is more fluid than Emma Watson, who pushes a fraction too hard but whose hard edge keeps the satire in focus.  Leslie Mann is brilliant as Watson’s home-schooling mother – a smiley, clueless motivator.  The girls may see themselves as relative have-nots but you wouldn’t guess it from their homes’ dimensions and decor.  The acreage of the rooms, in theory enviable, is actually alarming:  it comes to illustrate the empty space in the girls’ heads.  The interior decoration includes little yappy dogs.

15 July 2013