«The Bling Ring: all that glitters... or nothing at all

Cinema Wednesdays - Special edition: Sofia Coppola - Fanny Agostino

Between 2008 and 2009, a group of Californian teenagers made headlines with their nightly hold-ups, targeting celebrities such as Paris Hilton and Megan Fox for an estimated $3 million worth of jewelry and haute couture clothes. As flashy as its title, the film by Sofia Coppola based on facts will not transcend them. teenagers which are at one with consumer society and the pure enjoyment of the moment.

A bad start

The news fascinates. They question society, highlight the improbable. They frighten. They are a unique repository of mysterious powers of horror and wonder. It is also supernatural, as we seek to grasp and understand what in fact seems to elude any causal explanation. An incomprehension that changes as you read: social issues, choices or destiny, coincidences or simply missed opportunities. It's a little of all this that seems to be missing from Sofia Coppola's raw material.

Let's read into his game: Los Angeles, celebrity, the advent of social networks, rich teenagers left to their own devices. From A to Z, everything seems self-explanatory, like the unfolding of a vile anecdote. We'll understand why Marc (Israel Broussard), a clueless teenager who ends up in a high school for repeaters, meets the kleptomaniac Rebecca (Katie Chang) there or not. We'll wonder why these dirty kids - including Nicki, played by Emma Watson - are fascinated by fashion and Hollywood stars, stealing clothes to glitter in the City of Angels' posh clubs, becoming famous for their crimes... or not.

In Beverly Hills you'll become

Somewhat complicit in the doings of this golden youth, we enter lush mansions. The festival begins. An explosion of leather goods, zooming in on big brand logos, dialogues shot through with the identification of each item of clothing - in Paris Hilton's dressing room, you have to hold on tight - then off to a nightclub to show the world your booty on Facebook. And there it is again. The viewer's capacity for endurance is tested during this interminable hour in which all the actions of our white-collar criminals are repeated ad infinitum.

Even when filming the burglaries from the outside, the film goes round in circles. It becomes as clinical as the contemporary villas that serve as its prey: impersonal, empty, obtuse. Contemplating the large bay windows of these nouveau riche mansions, everything becomes lucid. Nothing is ever concealed; behind the Plexiglas and the camera, there's nothing but emptiness. 

From above the watchtower

Of course, Sofia Coppola casts a sarcastic eye on these astonishing young people and their idols, not to mention their stupidity, lack of lucidity and discretion... But how can you blame them? All these huge properties that reek of money and are devoted to the cult of the «me» - Paris Hilton's home is a real delight in this respect - are there to show these young people that they are the product of a society that flaunts itself. The society of reality TV, which blurs the boundaries between private and public life, and the cult of celebrity for what it represents.

Monstrous and soulless, these young people are the pure products made in the USA of individual pleasure. Moreover, once unmasked - by the notorious TMZ scandal site - nothing connects the gang of blinged-out gravediggers. Too bad it's only mocked from an outsider's point of view, which makes our view of these young people all the more cynical, not to mention their very stereotypical families.

The Bling Ring is not an adaptation of a true story. It does not achieve the sensations we seek when we read or watch an adaptation of an extraordinary experience. It is everything that is most ordinary in our time. It unfolds nothing and is content to show without taking any risks, without delving into its subject.

If it's not an adaptation, it's a modern tale: the key to the film is revealed not in the story itself, but in its moral. From his ivory tower, the spectator will be able to judge and free himself from an excessively long fiction that is content to expose the wrongs of a certain American youth, without giving the keys to interpretation. Missed shot.

Write to the author: fanny.agostino@leregardlibre.com

Photo credits: © Tobis Film