Coppola: The Bling Ring (2013)
Tuesday, February 4, 2014 
Based on real events, The Bling Ring follows a group of jaded Hollywood teens, led by Nicki Moore (Emma Watson), who break into the houses of the rich and famous. Not quite a film, it takes place at the intersection of a whole range of post-cinematic technologies – Facebook, fashion blogging, Google Street View, Google Earth – just as the celebrities that the Bling Ring targets tend to be quasi-cinematic, more famous as celebrities than for any of their particular films or roles. Like The Canyons, then, it attempts to envisage how a city founded on cinema might look in a post-cinematic era. And, like The Canyons, it decides that something like the myth of total cinema has come to pass, as the dispersal of cinematic infrastructure and experience across the entire urban landscape allows cinema to be everywhere and nowhere all at once. Among other things, that means that there are no firm cinematic thresholds anymore – it’s as impossible to enter the film as it is to leave it, just as every space and moment takes on the breathless threshold-magic that hangs over the entrance to a cinema, the beginning of a film, the sense that another world is imminent. Where that exhausted The Canyons, it positively exhilarates Coppola, partly because her New Wave romanticism has always fixated on just this brand of breathless ambience, the sense that every moment is a threshold in the making. And, for the most part, the Ring sets out to harvest this threshold-magic from the Los Angeles firmament, rarely stealing enough to be caught or even detected, often preferring to try on clothes rather than actually take them, more than stimulated by the thrill of garages, doorways and cupboards materialising out of the night (apparently it was only after the fifth burglary that Paris Hilton even realised there had been people in her house). Perhaps that’s why Coppola’s nightscapes are so pregnant, so fragrant, so redolent of that cinematic flavour of darkness that has all but disappeared with the decline of the multiplex, let alone the traditional theatre. With the addition of Harris Savides’ cinematography, it’s the most breathless, romantic space in her whole oeuvre, which is saying something, as well as an incredible swansong for his incredible career. Certainly, the recourse to computer screens, phone screens and GPS systems might puncture the mood at times, but it’s a testament to his fastidiousness that they’re always folded back into it as the precondition for its lush, aromatic textures. By Somewhere, Coppola’s yearning for transcendence was on the verge of imploding if it didn’t transcend itself, slip free of its cinematic shackles, and that's exactly what's achieved here, in what can only be described as a post-cinematic masterpiece.
Reader Comments (3)
This surely be a trending film for young viewers. Another film to look forward to.
I enjoyed the film. However I am not sure I can articulate just why!
I imagine that there have always been affluent people who cannot find a purpose in life and at the same time do not realise they have a existential problem.
It is refreshing to read a very positive review and an interesting take, particularly as it seems most viewers and reviewers (80% - 90% ?) just don't 'get' this film at all.
Thanks - yes, I really enjoyed it too. I find her films so elusive and mysterious...