Worth: $19.00
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Cast:
Cailee Spaeny, Jacob Elordi, Ari Cohen, Dagmara Domińczyk
Intro:
… gloriously paradoxical …
Priscilla, the latest film by Sofia Coppola, possesses all the gossamer beauty and deep melancholy that has become the director’s signature. Midway through the film, a grand full-shot shows Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny) standing beside her new husband, Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi), on their wedding day, a vision of mid-century glamour in ivory lace and liquid eyeliner. This is the bride’s fantasy realised and yet she appears vacant and doll-like, as though in the process of becoming steadily eviscerated.
Based on Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir, Elvis and Me, the film follows the lonely life of Elvis’ young wife, beginning with their courtship during her adolescence in West Germany, her move to Graceland, their tumultuous marriage, and the eventual birth of their daughter.
Priscilla is just fourteen when she meets the charismatic star at a party at his Bad Nauheim home and, naturally, becomes immediately besotted. One of the film’s greatest achievements is its ability to conjure the dizzying joy of this teenage dream-come-true even whilst presaging its toxicity. In the beginning, Elvis’ love quite literally illuminates Priscilla’s world, and so when he first smoulders at the young nymph from across a crowded room, he is aptly encircled by a glowy but ephemeral haze.
However, once Priscilla moves to Graceland to join Elvis more permanently, his chivalrous façade is quickly pierced, revealing a man who is controlling, sporadically cruel and often absent. Here, Elordi is superb as the King, each tilt of his head indicating a new mixture of magnetism and malice. A master of the long-take, Coppola recurrently deploys languorous wide-shots to evoke the slow passage of time as Priscilla pines for Elvis while he travels, tours and acts. The longer Elvis is away, the more the light within Priscilla dims and she is frequently shot, like the Lisbon sisters of Coppola’s debut film The Virgin Suicides, lolling corpse-like by the phone in pale darkness. In other moments, she is subdued by the dull, vanilla interiors of her Memphis mansion, wandering around its cavernous rooms like Coppola’s Marie Antoinette at Versailles.
Coppola weaves the plot with the lightest of touches, often following spoken exchanges with a lingering silence so as to allow viewers to ruminate on the interaction’s tacit implications. Spaeny, utterly masterful in the lead, does a brilliant job of conveying both her character’s anger and enduring affection with her baby-soft face. She is often glimpsed defiantly closing her eyes when Elvis yells out and sashaying through his eyeline in the printed dresses he has forbidden her from wearing. Yet, Priscilla is also passionate in her commitment to her husband when, at a Bible reading, she speaks over the other women who compete for his attention.
If Coppola’s films typically chronicle young women who are condemned by the men around them to suffocate beneath beautiful veils, Priscilla, in a fascinating turn, presents a protagonist who successfully escapes such a fate. In this gloriously paradoxical film, Coppola fashions a shimmering fairy-tale about the heady bliss of first love, and the necessity of abandoning that love when it becomes too great a burden. As the Dolly Parton track that closes the film makes clear, Priscilla will always love Elvis, but she cannot stay with him forever.
