The Bling Ring – Based on a true story featured in Vanity Fair called “The Suspects Wore Louboutin” comes a film written and directed by Sophia Coppola who has long earned her own reputation not as just the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola. In this, a ‘ring’ of five teens keep raising the stakes on petty theft and end up robbing homes of fashion diva stars from Lindsay Lohan to Paris Hilton. They seem smart, keeping it under wraps, until they begin posting their ‘bling’ on Facebook.
Parts of the story reminds me of the innocence and confusion of the coming of age tale The Virgin Suicides – Coppola’s first feature, but these girls aspire to run magazines, have their own perfume line and their own TV show, not kill themselves. They’re confident. The problem with the film is while it’s shot and directed as the best it can be, we don’t care about these girls. The cool sport of it is just criminal. They’re driven by bling, but seemingly one step away from being driven by paparazzi and gossip.
As a parent I felt sad. As a journalist I wanted to profile them- find out how far they thought they could go? Had the law not caught up with them, would the false sense of power done the job? What obsessed them to steal? People in the world of Manhattan fashion work really hard. Just ask any intern on a runway or the assistants posing in Devil Wears Prada. It seems these young girls – especially the most brilliant one portrayed by Harry Potter’s Emma Watson – weren’t really robbing things at all. They were ultimately channeling lifestyles.
What’s amusing is that celebrities have high-tech security devices but don’t do something as simple as lock their doors.
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