Sofia Coppola’s work is often misunderstood. A maestro of aesthetics, there’s a perception among some that her filmography is merely that: an exercise in visual textures—in mood, and not much else. This is a perspective, though, that fundamentally misunderstands what’s at the fulcrum of form. Form and function are inseparable in art-making. Key to Coppola’s observations—whether they are social, empathetic or both—is the use of visuals to deconstruct aesthetic culture from its governing ordinances. In other words, she sees both the image and what lies beneath it. For Coppola, the image is the object itself.
The Bling Ring, which had its tenth anniversary last year, is another picture in Coppola’s filmography that’s interested in myth and its relation to aesthetics. Coppola’s fifth feature is based on the 2010 Vanity Fair article “The Suspects Wore Louboutins,” which centered on seven teenagers in the Hollywood Hills who, together, tracked various celebrities’ whereabouts through the internet in order to burglarize their homes. As a film interested in consumerist tabloid culture and the images of mass media, The Bling Ring’s focus on aesthetics is a logical complement to the source material.
But, as compared to her previous work, like Somewhere or Lost in Translation, Coppola’s lens is more clinical than compassionate. The Bling Ring embraces the material, visual and aesthetic culture of the garish late aughts not to rebuke it but simply to perceive it. Within this, there’s an examination of the signs and signifiers of celebrity culture, of consumerist culture, of the American dream. But Coppola doesn’t feel the need to offer obvious, didactic commentary on all of this: she simply examines, through her heightened, aestheticized lens. The Bling Ring is a triumph, and stands apart from the rest of Coppola’s catalog, for this quasi-ethnographic approach. It’s one that’s less interested in following a particular character’s arc than it is in observing a milieu, all complemented by a deadpan tone.
This is captured best in a stilling scene midway through the film, where Marc (Israel Broussard) and Rebecca (Katie Chang) rob the home of reality television star Audrina Patridge. Having shown an extended sequence of the group at Paris Hilton’s home earlier—the teens’ commentary there vacillating between snark about her foot size and adulation for the designers they come across—Coppola opts for something different here.
Instead of focusing on the minutiae of the heist, on the Balmain and Christian Louboutin of it all, Coppola’s lens remains unmoving, fixed from afar on Patridge’s modernist house as Marc and Rebecca maneuver their way inside. The soft pink glow inside and the seemingly easy access to it is starkly rendered against the skyscrapers, separate against the mercurial, fluorescent lights of Los Angeles—an architectural signifier of the nearsighted mythology that Marc and Rebecca have ingested. Partridge—and crucially, her home—is the center of everything, because she has everything. As Marc and Rebecca head inside, sirens blare in the distance, but the noise is so far away that it doesn’t matter. If you have what she does, the rest is just background noise, insignificant in its homogeneity.
Once the two are in, they run from white wall to white wall, picking up miscellaneous thing to miscellaneous thing. However, Coppola’s camera remains set, its topographic lens suggesting that it has little interest in the shallow specifics of their desires; it’s much more interested in their smallness—that, in Coppola’s view of Los Angeles, is still rendered so large. Patridge’s house—a mecca of consumer culture, of celebrity culture—isn’t just the locus through which Marc and Rebecca find meaning and purpose. It’s where Hollywood finds meaning too.
Finally, the sirens fall away, giving way to the soft cries of birds and the piercing chirps of crickets. And yet Marc and Rebecca’s heist continues, as does Coppola’s soft focus and achingly slow zoom on Patridge’s house. Coppola doesn’t cut away until the duo does, but their attention never really wavers. The next scene, indeed, follows the group squealing over their spoils from Patridge’s home.
Throughout The Bling Ring, cinematographers Harris Savides and Christopher Blauvelt (the latter boarded the project after Savides fell ill) maintain this insistence on distance from the picture’s actors. The recurrent close-ups are mostly afforded to objects of glamor: think Dior shoes, D&G dresses, off-white hyper-modern architecture. Their stylized lens, even when occasionally focusing on the leads (usually following heists), speaks to the film’s enduring focus on the mythology of celebrity and consumer culture—even when it delineates this mythos as (literally) small and insignificant. Yet, at the same time, paradoxically, it is spatially and temporally all that really matters.
There have been few scenes like this in the entirety of Coppola’s filmography. This birds-eye approach to subject matter is peculiar for her. While the strength of her work has long rested upon the merging of form and function, the lack of focus on any particular character (in favor of a focus on a group) cements The Bling Ring as significant among her work—solidifying it as a film that balances its anthropological bent without holding its audience’s hand.
The picture’s ethnographic focus on a hyper-specific atmosphere makes it monumentally effective as a time capsule. When people think of The Bling Ring, they think of the nightclub scene where the teens dance to Azealia Banks’ “212” or Emma Watson’s nasal, vacant delivery of “Let’s go to Paris’s, I want to rob!” And rightfully so! Those two moments deftly encapsulate a specific millennial niche: the interest in gaudy reality television culture, pop stardom, designer fashion and tabloid culture. It’s all in poor taste, but the picture’s detachment from any of its characters renders the culture it depicts as mostly just sort of amusing.
Perhaps this is why Coppola’s depiction of a decidedly inelegant milieu in The Bling Ring has perplexed many. For those who insist on decoupling form from function, Coppola’s movies are moderately engaging because of her wistful aesthetics, which they see as merely indicative of a sophistication in style. Because The Bling Ring was so deliberately glitzy, this called that surface-level assessment of Coppola’s taste into question (see also: the consequences of the “depiction = endorsement” mindset). But what those detractors failed to see is how Coppola’s distanced lens makes The Bling Ring one of her smartest comedies. It’s a uniquely inquisitive work, one interested in a culture rather than directly disparaging or venerating of it. And its satirical approach trusts the viewer to come to their conclusions, which is what the best movies do.
Hafsah Abbasi is a film critic who has covered the Sundance Film Festival and the Mill Valley Film Festival in years past. She currently resides in Berkeley, California. Find her latest writing at https://twitter.com/hafs_uh.
