‘Priscilla’: Venice Review

Dir/scr. Sofia Coppola. US. 2023. 100mins

On the surface of it — the 1950s shagpile carpets and tight pink mohair jumpers – Sofia Coppola is simply recapping how it happened in Priscilla, made with her subject’s co-operation and based on the book ‘Elvis And Me’, by Priscilla Presley. But audiences will have to work hard not to come away with the clear understanding that Priscilla, a dreamy 14 year-old girl when they met, was recruited and groomed, and that Elvis Presley was controlling and abusive. As a schoolgirl, Priscilla was naturally passive, and she remains meek throughout Coppola’s picture; its soft, subtle lines are a striking counterpoint to last year’s razzle-dazzle-them Elvis, but it paints a darker, fuller picture.

 A unique story, told in a distinct way

Cailee Spaeny, who had a small part in Mare Of Easttown, faces a considerable challenge in breathing life into a woman who became a black beehived paparazzi image: iconic, certainly, but unknown and, certainly in Sofia Coppola’s film, perennially unformed and told what to do. The director focuses tightly on the central couple: her parents, his father, fall away, as does Elvis (Australian actor Jacob Elordi) himself, eventually. What’s left is a scared lonely girl in Graceland, living at Elvis’s whims, trying to please his tight-knit gang of Memphis hangers-on amid the late nights and the guns and the pills – which he first gave to her to keep awake in school.  

MUBI has taken rights for key international territories on Priscilla, and enduring curiosity surrounding The King is a given. Much of what takes place here is already known – that Elvis insisted Priscilla remain a virgin til their wedding night, for example – but the film’s muted sensitivity and enveloping design should seduce discriminating audiences when it releases at the end of the year. Watching real-life play out here brings a slow-moving realisation of the extent of the control a damp-eyed Elvis exacted on his child bride Priscilla: it is a chronicle of a life which was taken away. 

Apart from the almost-direct-to-Apple TV On The Rocks (2020), this is Coppola’s fullest film since The Beguiled and it shares a similar air with that work – this is no punkish Marie Antoinette. The music of Elvis is never used, and Colonel Parker only makes an appearance at the other end of the telephone, so it is wholly in thrall to the central couple. Performances and physicality bear a great weight. There’s a significant height disparity between Elordi and Spaeny, which was not the case in real life. It amplifies Priscilla’s childishness, makes it harder for her to come out from under his arm and grow. She’s always, literally and figuratively, deep in his shadow. A lack of grand speechifying may dampen reception in some areas, and the final stages are weaker than what has gone before, but the film’s softly-softly approach is also its ultimate strength.

Elvis met Priscilla Beaulieu in 1959 when he was stationed in West Germany with the US Army and she was a 14 year-old schoolgirl on the base. She was approached by an army officer at a cafe and asked to go to his house for ‘a party’. It’s not as if the lines were not clear at the time – two years previously Jerry Lee Lewis had set fire to his own career by marrying his own 13 year-old second cousin. Elvis and Lewis both hailed from Tupelo and were related by marriage. “Why, you’re a baby,” said the 22 year-old Elvis to 9th grader Priscilla. That didn’t stop them, though.

Priscilla’s parents, played here by Dagmara Dominczyk and Ari Cohen, were unable to stand in the way of what ensued, although they tried, and Coppola shows how hard that was for them. Eventually, she went to live in Graceland where she finished her studies and graduated high school by cheating. He plied her with presents from a dog to a sports car, but she was not allowed to ‘bring strangers’ to Graceland, and she lived a life of isolation as Elvis toured and made movies and his father Vern (Tim Post) ordered her around. “It’s me or a career, baby,” said Elvis, and he stipulated what she wore and how she did her hair and make-up. We all know that with Elvis the story gets dark and violent, and soon Priscilla is grappling with problems that are beyond her years or capabilities. 

Graceland becomes, in a way, like the central school in The Beguiled (the film shot in Toronto), a character that is alternately a paradise and a prison to the young Priscilla. There’s a lovely meld of production design and lensing by Tamara Deverell and Philippe Le Sourd, in particular, that brings the viewer directly to a time and place and a feeling. Elvis was young, the world loved him: Priscilla loved him; he would stay up all night with his gang of overgrown friends eating fried chicken and rollerskating. Fans waited at the gates for his every move. But as the idea he seemed to have that, in some way, Priscilla would be a replacement for his dead mother Gladys faded to dark, the doors were shuttered, the curtains closed, and she was left alone.

Elordi does not have the charisma of an Austin Butler, but that is not what is required here. The film is called Priscilla, not ‘Elvis’. He has to be a abuser dressed in a costume, hiding in plain sight – including from his own charming self. He achieves this, and more. The sadness that has been visited on the Presley family, most recently with the death of their daughter Lisa Marie, seems to stem from this well which Sofia Coppola draws upon. It is a unique story, told in a distinct way.