The Bling Ring – Cannes first look review

Sofia Coppola is a director who has perplexed and annoyed many with her indulgent portraits of poor little rich-and-famous girls. Personally, I couldn't sit still for her last film, Somewhere, which featured Elle Fanning as the adored and adorable teen daughter of a famous actor dad. Her movies have been in danger of becoming gritless oysters of non-satire, lenient insider studies, offering celluloid hugs to the cossetted comfortable.

But her new film, the opening gala to the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes, is an interesting surprise. There is something in her unjudging approach that is unexpectedly appropriate – and effective. It lets her get up close and personal to the story and characters, which conventional irony (from a director like Larry Clark or a writer like Bret Easton Ellis) wouldn't get near. And it lets you experience the creepiness for yourself, helped by the cool, clear "reportage" cinematography of the late Harris Savides, in his final movie.

The film is based on a very contemporary true-life phenomenon: the so-called "Bling Ring", a gang of teen burglars from wealthy homes in Hollywood who were obsessed with celebs. By using the web, Google Maps, and checking celebrities' Facebook updates and Twitter feeds (and fanatically updating their own in parallel), they could figure out which of them were out of town and where they lived, and knew instinctively which ones were stupid enough to leave their houses without proper security. This basically meant Paris Hilton, whose place was hit many times.

On a spree in 2009 – immortalised in a Vanity Fair article on which this film is based – they got away with millions of dollars' worth of clothes and jewellery, but the real point was fetishising the celebs. And Coppola shows that people like Lindsay Lohan are themselves guilty of theft. Once convicted, the bling ring wind up in prison with their victims: stealing and shoplifting are general symptoms of the same dysfunction and compulsive disorder, the need to be famous.

Katie Chang plays blingringleader Rebecca, while Israel Broussard plays her submissive lieutenant and platonic BF, Marc; our own Emma Watson plays fellow burglar and fashion obsessive Nicki, sister of Sam, played by Taissa Farmiga. Their mother Laurie (Leslie Mann) home schools them with chuckleheaded New Age theories, secular group prayers, and show'n'tell teaching sessions on why Angelina Jolie is a role model.

Another kind of movie – entitled, perhaps, The Sociopath Set – would have made the burglars turn on each other, and specifically curdled the relationship between Rebecca and Marc. Not here, and even the hint of betrayal in Rebecca's final departure for Las Vegas is not laboured. But there is something oddly plausible about the lack of a conventional dramatic falling-out-among-thieves. It's as if they are too stunned, too vacant, too weirded out by their success to react normally. The intonations of "Eeuw" and "I know, right?" govern their thought processes.

The movie's approach to celebrity is disorientating. The ring show up at a club where there are real-life cameo appearances from stars playing themselves – Kirsten Dunst and, yes, Paris Hilton herself. (Wouldn't they all, Paris and Kirsten included, turn round and gape at Emma Watson?) It's a bit self-conscious, but it interestingly collapses the distinction between fact and fiction; it puts you inside the unwholesome opium den of celeb-worship, and when the gang infiltrate Hilton's bizarre home, a Tutankhamun's tomb of kitsch, there is a real frisson. Did Coppola use the real thing?

The Bling Ring is a very distant, minor cousin to Robert Bresson's Pickpocket or Christopher Nolan's Following. The final notes of irony and repudiation may be laboured and obvious, but this is an intriguingly intuitive and atmospheric movie.