The Herald - The Herald Magazine
A modern day Bonnie and Clyde in La-la land
TV FILM OF THE WEEK
BARRY DIDCOCK
THE BLING RING
Friday, BBC2 (11.05pm)
UNTIL she appeared in Greta Gerwig’s Oscar-nominated adaptation of Little Women last year, Emma Watson’s post-Harry Potter career hadn’t exactly been storied. Did you enjoy (or even bother to watch) the biblical epic Noah (a “farrago” according to The New Yorker) or the 1970s-set Colonia (“a glib trivialisation of one of the grimmer chapters of Chilean history” said The Guardian) or techno-thriller The Circle (a paltry 14% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes)? Thought not.
The stand-out exception is this typically accomplished 2013 film from American director Sofia Coppola, daughter of Godfather director
Francis Ford Coppola. A true story, it’s based on a 2010 Vanity Fair article written by Nancy Jo Sales and headlined “The suspects wore Louboutins”.
That’s a reference to a brand of shoe much favoured by the sort of people who think £500 is a reasonable price tag for footwear. People like American socialite Paris Hilton.
Sales’s article outlined the case of a group of celebrity-obsessed Los Angeles kids who had taken to breaking into famous people’s homes where they tried on their clothes, indulged in a little light vandalism and then made off with a souvenir or three.
In one scene in The Bling Ring that souvenir is a dog, but it’s thought the real-life Bling Ring stole goods worth around $3 million.
Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton herself were just two of the victims, though often the homeowners didn’t even realise they’d been done over, a fact which tells its own story about California’s wealthy set.
For Coppola, a whip-smart student of entitled ennui, celebrity culture and the vapid lives of well-heeled
American youth, the story was just too good to pass up – a modern day Bonnie and Clyde story, though in this case there were four Bonnies and one Clyde and they were armed with smartphones rather than pistols. Coppola turns the scandal into a satirical black comedy with an icy, amoral heart in which the gang track their victims via their social media postings.
Example: “Paris Hilton’s hosting a party in Vegas tonight! Let’s Google where she lives and use Street View to case the joint! Then let’s break in, have a party and steal some shoes!”. Or something like that.
Watson plays the aloof Nicki Moore, one of the gang. Also in the cast are Taissa Farmiga (soon to be seen in Julian Fellowes’s latest historical blockbuster The Gilded Age) and Israel Broussard, who features in teen drama To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before. Paris Hilton, bless her, appears as herself, and even allowed Coppola and her crew to film the scenes set in her house in her actual house – blackout blinds were used to make it look like night-time.
The performances are appropriately cool and detached, Watson’s in particular, and there’s some great image-making by cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt who mixes up the film’s visual textures by using internet and camera-phone footage and CCTV-style nightvision shots.
And keep a close eye out for Kirsten Dunst, who played Lux Lisbon in Coppola’s 1999 debut The Virgin Suicides and the title role in her 2006 film Marie Antoinette.
Dunst features in The Bling Ring playing herself in a nightclub the gang frequent. “Wow, there’s Kirsten Dunst,” says Broussard’s Marc admiringly as the gang sit and plan their next spree.