Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring is the finest horror movie of recent years. It depicts a group of dead-eyed demons, passing through Los Angeles like a wind from the gates of hell. And those are the victims.
I don't wish to give undue credit. This is a film about unimportant people doing unimportant things. They are trivial, ephemeral, ultimately worthless. The horror of the film comes in the titanic importance they place on their own struggles, in the utter disconnect with anything resembling reality. Consider, for example, the protagonist so chillingly embodied by Katie Chang. In a few years, we sense that she will become the girl of Patrick Bateman's dreams. She has no friends, only disciples. No aspirations, only greed. No morality beyond what she's seen glaring from the television. Her expression is the same opening a car and robbing a house, snorting cocaine and gyrating on the dance floor. She smiles only when in her paradise, surrounded by the neon embodiments of fame and glitz. This is our brainwashed youth.
Consider Marc, the sad, lonely, besotted fame whore played by Israel Broussard. Is he gay? Perhaps, but his occasionally carnal glances at Nikki suggest otherwise. Note that he takes very little part in the robberies. Often, Coppola frames him apart, standing in a corner or trapped by dark lines within space. Caged. He is intriguing for the suggestions that he knows what the Ring is doing to be wrong, morally as well as legally. And yet, he never acts. He stands in his corners and watches, a horrified but ultimately complicit audience. This is us. Watching, enabling, giving the glitterati what they need to survive.
Consider Nikki, played by Emma Watson with a shaky accent and a viper's low cunning. She might be too stupid to have what she considers a successful life, but more frightening is the suggestion that she might be too stupid not too. A special note must be made of Watson, who delivers the film's best performance. It's hard not to view this project as a calculated shedding of her most famous role, but the truth remains inescapable that this is a fantastically talented young actress.
Coppola remains one of the true auteurs in modern cinema. Actually "voyeur" might be a better term. Her films are those of an observer, a mostly-stationary camera serving as our window into these twisted souls. There is an intellectual remove to this movie, a pulled-back, almost shocked distance. We understand that Coppola, who of course is the child of Hollywood royalty, is glad that she didn't turn out as these twisted chidren have done.
To that end, she almost completely masks her considerable skill as a technical director. The movie is quietly beautiful to look at, shot primarily by the late, great Harris Saviedies. Sound design, location scouting, blocking, and costuming are all impeccable. Much like her father in his early years, Coppola trusts character, story, and absolutely nothing else. Any flashes of auteuristic flair, such as a justly famous sequence depicting a robbery in a single shot, draw attention by virtue of so completely sublimating their form to the function of the story. The one-take robbery is a masterpiece of blocking and execution, but it is Coppola's slow, subtle push-in that makes the scene.
First, the camera-movement inexorably restricts the boundaries of the shot, reducing the frame to a tight cage around a glowing glass house. The idiot children, scampering inside, are similarly constrained, by their greed and ugly ambition, into the glowing world to which they do not belong. Second, Coppola's zoom implicates the viewer in the crime they are watching. Slow it might be, but the camera is active, in motion, suggestive of a personality behind the eye. We watch, and are entertained, and do nothing. The whole movie in this was is a dare, a question. If you were Marc, standing on the fringes of the beautiful fake world with a girl's hand outstretched to you, what would you do?
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