Review: Priscilla

Director:  Sofia Coppola

Stars:  Cailee Spaeny, Jacob Elordi, Dagmara Domińczyk

The newly crowned Queen of Graceland, Priscilla Presley (Cailee Spaeny), has just awoken her husband Elvis (Jacob Elordi) because she’s felt the first contractions of her labour. While Elvis kicks up the bed covers and leaps out of the room to hustle up the various members of his staff, Priscilla studiously applies her false eyelashes. If she’s to be seen out in public, she has to look the part. This scene – humorous in isolation – arrives deep into Sofia Coppola’s gilded new movie; a biopic that’s very much the flipside or antidote to Baz Luhrmann’s recent maximalist flick. The two auteurs couldn’t have more disparate approaches to their form, and its a curiously fitting dichotomy. If Luhrmann gave us the showbiz, the razzmatazz, Coppola frames the emptiness, the disquiet, and the strange and soft monstrosities of obscene and dislocating celebrity. Through this lens, Priscilla’s act of applying her make-up in this moment (to all others an emergency) isn’t funny. It’s a symptom of an instilled set of behaviours put upon her by a controlling Giant.

Giant is right. Elordi stands at 6ft 5inches to Spaeny’s 4ft 11. He towers over her. Sometimes their standing next to one another induces vertigo. I was initially sceptical of his casting for this, but his baring becomes queasily pertinent.

Lets go back. Germany, 1959. Elvis is stationed in Europe, as is Priscilla’s father, Captain Beaulieu (Ari Cohen). It is in this capacity that a 14-year-old Priscilla is invited to visit with the King, approached in an American-style diner by a member of Elvis’ amorphous entourage. Elvis is already a grown man, and famous. And if this sounds like dubious grooming for the privileged… it is. Coppola’s film – based on her subject’s own memoirs (and Priscilla Presley is a producer here) – tilts the camera to the side, to where it wasn’t always focused thanks to the vortex of Presley’s fame. We’re invited to experience this incredibly skewed courtship through her eyes. In the process, Coppola creates a swirl of mid-century Americana, one that feels in conversation with every one of her previous pictures.

If Lost in Translation provoked chatter for its May-December romance, age-gap sensitivity has only grown more prominent in the intervening 20 years. Elvis’ affection for teenage Priscilla here is always, pointedly predatory; an uneasy dynamic in which the star-struck youngster has none of the power. In this regard, it is within touching distance of Marie Antoinette, particularly recalling Coppola’s depiction of the young queen’s ceremonial handover in the frostbitten woods. Priscilla reconfigures the girl’s bedroom daydreams of The Virgin Suicides from those imagined by infatuated boys to those dreamed by an infatuated girl. Coppola’s ever-present connection to the isolationism of fame continues apace. The empty days of Somewhere return, as do the gaggle of fans clambering to get a piece (The Bling Ring). Finally, Elvis’ barely-concealed affairs continue the themes of paranoia and fidelity that bubbled through Coppola’s flimsiest feature, 2020’s COVID-bombed On the Rocks. Priscilla feels like the intersection of an entire filmography.

Formal choices cement this cohesion, from carrying over the typeface from On the Rocks to the decision to emulate the anachronistic (yet perfect) soundtrack swerves that typified Marie Antoinette. Coppola uses source music – in particular pop music – to convey an almost tangible yearn for youth, freedom and immortality. The false sense or hope that a moment can last forever like a melody written into a record groove. Priscilla itself unfurls like a pop epic, repeatedly returning to the same riffs until they become a dirge.

The years start ticking by. Elvis controls the flow and tempo of their off-kilter relationship, proffering pills like candy, fostering her to womanhood, withholding physical intimacy. Through this we find the initial power imbalance reconfigured (yet essentially sustained) as Priscilla herself becomes a sexual being frustrated that the superstar who plucked her from obscurity is reticent to consummate. Her agency is revealed to us, then thwarted, while Elvis dictates every aspect of her appearance, from her hair colour to the dresses she may wear. Priscilla comes to seem like little more than a man’s personal Barbie; something that insinuates his own arrested development.

Warped by such fame and the controlling hands of his father Vernon (Tim Post) and the insistences of the unseen Colonel, one gets the sense that Elvis is passing down a pattern of behaviour, moulding Priscilla just as he himself has been, perpetuating a cycle. Graceland becomes an echo chamber. Lacking any other strong guidance, Priscilla concedes to the whims of her beloved, while tolerating affairs made public by the paparazzi.

Every Coppola movie feels like its own mood board, and Priscilla becomes a flick book of ’60s fashions curated by Chanel. The hair and make-up work in tandem with these immaculate choices, and Priscilla’s subtly increasing defiance of Elvis’ command reveal her growth and discovery of independence. There’s a notable shift in the dynamic between them the moment we first see her in pants, for instance, while the colour brown (which he abhors as it reminds him of the army) slowly wends its way back into her hair and wardrobe.

Elordi evokes the charisma of Presley well. The swagger and the confidence, but also the tantrums and spoiled behaviour. Having already marked himself out as the clear highlight of Emerald Fennell’s chaotic Saltburn, this past year has sealed his status as a breakout star and coming A-lister. But Spaeny is the centre of this picture, charting a course from 14 to 28 – half a lifetime – for a woman whose discovery of her own independence has been throttled by something called love.

Coppola remains drama-averse at times (the film’s finale teeters awkwardly around a sexual assault and might well be read as anticlimactic), but these instincts further mark Priscilla out as the inverse Elvis. Indeed her decision to withhold any scenes of physical intimacy between the two ultimately feels correct; an extension of the emotional distance played beautifully by the leads.

Her eye remains detached yet doleful, and of her three collaborations with cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd this is possibly the most swoon-worthy yet (revisit the sun-dappled glades of The Beguiled and you’ll be reminded that there is stiff competition). Ultimately a tale of a woman belatedly finding her own agency, Priscilla feels like an act of encouragement from Coppola, and another reflection on the inexorable draw of celebrity. Both our fascination and, openly, her own.

Be it a Michigan suburb, a Tokyo skyscraper, Versailles or Graceland, Coppola’s princesses are always looking for ways out of their castles.

Priscilla is out in the UK in January of 2024 via MUBI, and as such will not feature on The Lost Highway Hotel’s forthcoming Best of 2023, which is based on UK release dates.