Recensioni de* critic*

The nearly feral protagonists dive over the barrier separating mere mortals from the fame they believe that they deserve. A life spent keeping tabs on human beings as if they were characters in an epic poem has reduced them to human simulacra. They live to pose themselves in the clothes of people whose exploits have beguiled them... Coppola poses the kids as if they were subjects of a forgotten master's oil study, a story of heroes of ancient picaresques.

It's all rather perverse, in addition to being vapid and aesthetically null. It's all fitting, I suppose, for the subject matter. But then, this begs the question of why anyone felt the need to memorialize this historical footnote to the E! Channel daily log, to deliver this half-assed paean to a demimonde that's much more debased than based.

With The Bling Ring, the writer-director performs a quiet self-excoriation by aligning herself with a risible breed of entitlement without giving up her film's visual allure, jettisoning the male paradigm that's often powered her narratives, often attributed to her relationship with her father.

The cleverest aspect of Coppola's narrative patterning, though it's one that contributes to the film's slightly imbalanced quality, is that she largely reduces the middle hour to a flow of instant gratification: little small talk, minimal character development, just a series of criminal forays that offer the illicit thrills of exploration, like a sort of pirate edition of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," and the payoff of hard partying and private delight in shiny things.

The renowned cinematographer [Harris Savides] shows a world so beautiful as to seem unreal, even fake. Both Hilton's involvement and Savides' portrayal represent the complexity of a film that appears as vapid as the lifestyle it's infiltrating.

Coppola neither makes a case for her characters nor places them inside of some kind of moral or critical framework; they simply pass through the frame, listing off name brands and staring at their phones. About an hour into the film, one starts to get the nagging feeling that Coppola's "neutrality" is a dodge; she avoids moral commitment, thereby creating a movie ambiguous enough to be interpreted in several ways, but too vague to have much meaning in any interpretation.

If Coppola has a major talent, it's for creating and sustaining uniquely breathable onscreen atmospheres: moistly poisonous suburban breezes in The Virgin Suicides (1999), dank, echo-chamber chill in Marie Antoinette, buzzy, hotel-air-conditioner suffocation in Lost in Translation and Somewhere... The Bling Ring, though, is mostly airless: it's like watching a movie playing out under glass.

The film's fatal flaw is that there aren't enough of these sobering visual moments to convey a defined social critique of celebrity obsession that feels more than skin deep. Instead, Coppola's mosaic of characters grows more obnoxious and simplistic as they feign reform, the most heinous example being Watson's club-hopping, coke-snorting brat.

Dedicated to the late cinematographer Harris Savides, who was unable to complete filming, The Bling Ring shoots each robbery with a perverse matter-of-factness. It's easily Coppola's least flashy film, but that's not to say it lacks poetry—the burglarizing of Hills star Audrina Patridge's home is shown in a single, gorgeous long shot. If the tone of lyrical crime saga has critics name-checking Spring Breakers... The Bling Ring isn't so much interested in provocation as sociology.

In "The Bling Ring," [Coppola] casts her net wider than ever, delving into the irresistibly fascinating representations of the age—the banal simulacra of selfhood from which both ordinary social life and actual celebrity are made. Daring to face these often noxious, seemingly empty phenomena on aesthetic terms, and taking on a degree of their flatness and simplicity, Coppola renders them surprisingly substantial.

There are times, when Coppola is having its dim characters strut about in stolen duds in slow-mo to gangsta rap, that the film feels more like Todd Solondz than the director of "The Virgin Suicides" and "Lost in Translation." It's not that Solondz is beneath her; he's just a different, polarizing filmmaker, and it's distressing to see her try her hand at sour jokiness.

The Bling Ring, Sofia Coppola's deceptively shallow but ultimately fascinating latest, is animated by that spirit of we-don't-give-a-fuck playfulness.