The Bling Ring. 2013. USA. Written and directed by Sofia Coppola. With Emma Watson, Israel Broussard, Katie Chang. 90 min.
Coppola’s fifth feature recounts the story of bored, fame-obsessed teenagers in the Los Angeles suburbs who managed to commit a series of audacious heists, breaking into the homes of real-life celebrities before (inevitably) drawing attention to themselves. An expansion and adaptation of Nancy Jo Sales’s 2010 Vanity Fair article “The Suspects Wore Louboutins,” The Bling Ring is enthralling for the way it juxtaposes the all-American obsession with wealth and fame against the precarity of the Great Recession. In her final collaboration with cinematographer Harris Savides, Coppola’s signature fascination with nouveau riche lifestyles gives The Bling Ring an all-too-reasonable eye for the finer things, with Coppola’s sympathies evenly divided between her disaffected latchkey-kid antiheroes (Israel Broussard, Katie Chang, and Emma Watson) and their famous victims, including Paris Hilton, who gamely plays herself in a cameo.