Sofia Coppola talks about ‘The Bling Ring’

Sofia Coppola talks about ‘The Bling Ring’

On a drizzly May afternoon in Cannes, France, Sofia Coppola is curled up in a chair in the lounge of a huge hotel, dressed in trousers and a blue-and-white pinstripe shirt, Chanel ballet flats peeking out from beneath her knees, her fingernails painted an on-trend shocking pink. The nail polish is pretty much the only thing shocking about Coppola. The night before, she attended the Cannes Film Festival premiere of her new film, “The Bling Ring”; she had spent all of this day doing press and was showing signs of fatigue. But she brightened when talk turned to Paris Hilton, who had shown up at the screening along with Coppola and “Bling Ring” star Emma Watson. “I was excited that she came and that she liked the movie,” said Coppola in her soft, almost sing-song voice. “She’s a nice person. I was surprised when I met her. I thought she’d be very different from her persona, but she was very warm.” Under normal circumstances, Paris Hilton and Sofia Coppola communing on the red carpet conjures images of the publicity-hungry Hilton eyeing yet another opportunity for free press. But the blonde socialite was actually something of a technical advisor for Coppola on “The Bling Ring,” and even offered up her own house for filming. The movie dramatizes the story of a group of Los Angeles-area teenagers who in 2009 burgled celebrities’ houses after ascertaining from Internet gossip sites that the residents weren’t home — ultimately lifting around $3 million in jewelry, clothes and personal items. One of their victims was Hilton, whose home in “The Bling Ring” is revealed to be a cross between an enormous walk-in closet and an altar to All Things Paris, right down to the glamour shots on the walls and portraiture on the throw pillows. “She told me she liked it when people laughed when they saw the pictures of her,” Coppola said, betraying not a scintilla of disbelief. “She has a good, playful sense of humor.” After such mood pieces as “The Virgin Suicides,” “Lost in Translation,” “Marie Antoinette” and “Somewhere,” “The Bling Ring” feels like a departure for Coppola, who throughout her career has steadfastly resisted the tyranny of narrative, instead creating lush, impressionistic odes to atmosphere and emotion. With its ripped-from-the-headlines topicality and crime-and-punishment arc, “The Bling Ring” is far more conventional, even if Coppola approaches the material with her signature love of visual beauty and detailed production design. Indeed, “The Bling Ring” occasionally recalls “Marie Antoinette” in its depiction of heedless materialism and fetishistic shots of gems, shoes and the coveted stuff of 21st century consumer culture. “But this is pretty excessive,” Coppola insisted. “ ‘Marie Antoinette’ was decadent, but it was beautiful decadence. This is tacky decadence. [In] Paris’s closet, with that many shoes, it gets to the point where it’s just kind of sensory overload.” There’s another strand of continuity with Coppola’s previous movies in the fact that, in many ways, “The Bling Ring” is about a group of aimless — if amoral — young women, for whom spraying on perfume belonging to Lindsay Lohan (another victim, who at the time of the robberies was facing her own charges of shoplifting) takes on the contours of a transmigration of souls.




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