Dir: Sofia Coppola

With: Emma Watson, Katie Chang, Israel Broussard

Runtime: 90 minutes

SOFIA Coppola's drama about a group of teenage burglars robbing the rich and famous in LA is a glossy, preening, utterly shallow affair. If there was an Oscar for matching film style to subjects, Ms Coppola could order her gown today.

Do not enter here if you are in the market for a searing commentary on a celebrity-obsessed popular culture. Try the shop next door for a coruscating examination of consumerism gone mad. Though this is a tale of criminal activity, any resemblance between The Bling Ring and an episode of The Wire is entirely impossible.

Do come in, however, if you desire 90 minutes of gazing at pretty people fondling designer handbags, shoes, clothes, and soft furnishings. Think of watching The Bling Ring, in short, as the cinema equivalent of a long soak in the bath with an ad-stuffed magazine. If nothing else, the director of Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette has an eye for an arresting image, and she demonstrates it here.

The Bling Ring, indeed, began life as a magazine article by Nancy Jo Sales. To be precise, the story started when two bored high school kids, on hearing a celebrity was away, looked up her address on the internet. Finding the house unlocked, they did what kids in a sweet shop do. Recruiting more friends, the gang soon found itself going "shopping" in other celebrity homes. When their luck eventually ran out the pals became minor celebrities themselves, thus showing how celebrity culture gorges on itself.

It is a good story, the kind that washes out of the glittery gutters of LA from time to time, which makes for a chewy read over a couple of thousand words. As the outline for a feature film, however, it has obvious disadvantages. For a start, there are slim pickings in the way of character development. Characters begin as puddle-deep, monumentally annoying people and end up the same way. The outcome of the story, such was the publicity surrounding the original case and the current hype for the picture, is already known.

With substance wanting, Coppola has no option but to rely on style to drive the picture. That, and her young cast.

Playing the girl-and-one-guy gang are Katie Chang, Israel Broussard, Emma Watson, Claire Julien and Taissa Farmiga. Miss Watson, readers will recall, made her name in some obscure franchise called the Harry Potter series. It played a few arthouse cinemas I believe, and put in not too shabby a show at the box office. Today, the girl who was Hermione Granger is now all grown up and looking for grown-up roles. Her character here, Nicki, will have to do for now.

Watson actually does rather well with a character so devoid of interesting angles she might as well be a bowl of blancmange. Playing an American youngster among the genuine articles, as she did in the recent The Perks of Being a Wallflower, she can more than hold her own.

If the brief was to play thoroughly irksome individuals then all the young cast deserve prizes. To listen to their endless prattling and watch them salivate over shoes and bags like blow-dried vultures is to become extremely irritated, very quickly. Where does a writer-director go from that difficult position? Assuming the audience hasn't bought tickets just to ogle the goodies (as many an impressionable youngster doubtless will), how does she get them back on side?

Coppola's answer is not to bother. There is some attempt at character development in the documentary-style interviews that pepper the story, but it is like being offered a single crisp when you fancy sitting down to a meal. Similarly, there is a touch of satire in the sub-plot of Leslie Mann's mother home-schooling teenagers using examples from the world of celebrity culture. Angelina Jolie not Jane Eyre rules OK. Again, though, Coppola does not linger long.

She is more interested in keeping the bling-bling show on the road than delving into motives and any wider questions that might be asked. Questions such as who ultimately paid for all the expensive gewgaws that the teenagers steal, and isn't the entertainment business, movies in particular, as guilty as anyone in selling unattainable lifestyles? All such questions will have to wait for another picture, another director.

What Coppola can offer, though, are celebrity cameos from the likes of Kirstin Dunst and Paris Hilton (the latter one of the burglary victims). Like the kids in a nightclub scene, we are presumably expected to ooh and ah at their presence. More worthy of your admiration are her shots of LA by night and one scene in particular when Coppola stands back from the action, showing the burglars running in and out of a home like it was a doll's house.

Ultimately, watching The Bling Ring reminded me of an old French and Saunders skit in which the comedians played two magazine editors discussing the features for next week. In the middle of gabbling about knitting patterns and the beautiful celebrity home they would be visiting, one of them breaks down and sobs, "But it's all so trivial!" Quite.

Review

The Bling Ring (15)

HHH