THE RINGLEADER: THE CASE OF THE BLING RING
US, 2023, 95 minutes, Colour.
Directed by Erin Lee Carr.
An American audience for this documentary might well remember the events of the late 2000s, the story of Los Angeles teenagers robbing the homes of celebrities like Lindsay Lohan, Orlando Bloom… The media called it The Bling Ring.
Audiences outside America might have come across this story through Sofia Coppola’s fiction film, based on the events and characters, The Bling Ring, featuring Katie Chang and Emily Watson.
Another documentary for television was made about The Bling Ring, featuring two of the central characters, Nick Prugo and Alexis Neiers who appeared on television sitcom, Pretty Wild. While the film offered the opportunity for interviews with these two, much of the reaction to the program was that they were very self-serving.
Erin Lee Carr has directed a number of documentaries on controversial events in American society, drug scandals, gymnastics scandals, murder cases, and Britney versus Spears.
This time the focus is on Rachel Lee, Korean American, the ringleader of the Bling Ring. While there is a great deal of footage from the past, her family, interviews with her father, her growing up, friends at school, footage of the robberies from surveillance cameras, police footage, the main part of the film is a lengthy interview with Rachel Lee herself, some years after the events and some years after her release from her prison term.
Again, the question can arise from viewers as to how much the interview is self-serving for Rachel Lee. As some kind of counterpoint, the scenes with Rachel Lee are intercut with interviews from journalists and, especially, detective investigators who are able to put more realistic point of view about the teenagers, the celebrities, the crimes, the handling of the issues by the media. Interestingly, one of the detectives who is into self-promotion, was associated with Sofia Coppola’s film, against regulations, harming aspects of the preparing of the case.
Which means then that the film is a close-up study of Rachel Lee herself, her understanding of herself, her explanations.
As with some of the other characters, there are speculations about the influence of family, Rachel’s absent mother, her professional gambler father (scenes of him in the flashbacks as well as the contribution to this documentary). There are the issues of family life, affluence or not, life in the hills outside Los Angeles, the preoccupation with celebrities, aspects of envy, and the temptation to robbery. Rachel, teenager, appears as the mastermind of the Bling Ring robberies, some interviews with her associates, especially Nick, the background to the online video maker, friendly than antagonistic towards Nick, the young women involved in the robberies.
And the focus is on the celebrity life of the targets of robbery, their appearance in the media, and the use of the Internet to find out where they would be, when their homes would not be occupied, the opulent life of some of them like Paris Hilton, the robberies, jewellery, clothes, storing them, at one stage a sale at Venice Beach, the cumulative effect of the experiences.
There are also sequences of their being tracked down, the arrests, Nick giving the information to the police, Rachel’s observation on her being sold out by him, the focus on the television celebrity and her arrest. The record cases, trials, sentences, modifications. There is Rachel, accepting her responsibility, long sentence, and being modified, her going to jail, the comments on her experience of broadening horizons, the self-centred, changing for her adult life.
The impact of the film will depend on audiences accepting Rachel Lee’s explanations herself, her self-examination, her attempts at honesty about herself, her judgements about her past, the effect of the experience on her and her future life.
