After all, she’s living in the world after Elvis Presley remade it! Priscilla’s father is stationed at the U.S. The dramatic question that drives “Priscilla” is: Are we seeing a deeply flawed and ultimately wounding relationship? Or are we seeing a vibrantly innocent young woman give herself over to a mirage?Īs Priscilla, Cailee Spaeny has an avid stare and a sharpness of spirit, and she makes a point of playing the teenage Priscilla as a typical American girl of her time, courtly and decorous, though with a taste for adventure. At moments you may wonder: Where are the arcs? But the arc is the whole movie - the tale of how the ebullient, soft-voiced rock ‘n’ roll idol who Priscilla thought she was falling in love with evolved into a pathological personality, though maybe he always was. The daring thing Coppola does, given that we’re used to seeing even sophisticated biopics weave the lives they’re showing us into dramatic arcs, is to present the rise and fall of Priscilla and Elvis’s relationship as a diary, one that simply flows forward in a kind of objective Zen fashion, never trumping anything up. ![]() At first we see that a lot of what transpires between Priscilla and Elvis is a heightened version of what defined so many romantic partnerships of the ’50s and ’60s, when men ruled the roost and women’s roles were subservient, proscribed, curtailed. The film ushers us right into Graceland (you really feel like you’re there), showing us what happened, just as it happened, without sweetener or frills. And it’s about the true love she felt, and the hope she nurtured that their connection could grow into something vital and soul-nourishing, instead of what it turned out to be.Ĭoppola, who wrote and directed “Priscilla,” tells this story with open eyes, so that we’re caught up, for a while, in the otherworldly entrancement of what it would mean to have the biggest star on the planet choose you to be his princess. It’s about how she grew up into a kept woman, watching Elvis fly off to shoot his movies and have affairs with his costars. It’s about how after not too long, Elvis moved Priscilla into Graceland, where she was treated like a precious object and given everything she wanted - except for the freedom to make her own decisions, choose her own clothes, play with a dog on the lawn, or much of anything else. It’s about how she was drawn, over the protests of her parents, right into his orbit - because he was charming and sexy and famous, because he pledged to love her tender, and who was going to say no to Elvis Presley? It’s about the honest affection they shared, rooted in the fact that both of them, literally or in spirit, were overgrown kids. military base in West Germany in 1959, when she was 14 years old. It’s all about how she met Elvis, at his home just off the U.S. ![]() This is Priscilla Beaulieu Presley’s story. ![]() Last year’s Elvis Presley biopic was called “Elvis.” The book that the new movie is based on was “Elvis and Me.” But Coppola’s film is called, simply, “Priscilla,” and that cues us to something essential: that the movie, while you could describe it as a love story, is not going to be told from a dual point-of-view. In the 17 years since “Marie Antoinette,” she has grown as a filmmaker - her storytelling now has an organic detail and emotional precision that sweep you right up. This time, though, Coppola goes in the opposite direction, working with a casually meticulous docudrama authenticity. Coppola’s new movie dramatizes the relationship between Priscilla and Elvis Presley, and the parallels with the earlier film are there if you want to see them. ![]() The last time Sofia Coppola made a movie about a teenage royal living in a rococo palace that turned out to be a lavish prison, it was 2006, and the movie, “Marie Antoinette,” was a stylized dream of history - the story of the young queen as naïve and isolated rock star.
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