Sofia Coppola's 'Priscilla' presents an American fairy-tale all shook up – Entertainment Weekly News

From Vegas impersonators to Oscar-nominated performances, Elvis Presley has greater than obtained his due in popular culture. Now, after many years in his shadow, Priscilla Beaulieu Presley will get the Hollywood therapy herself.

Sofia Coppola writes and directs off Priscilla’s personal memoir Elvis and Me, turning her auteurial discernment for the isolation and loneliness of girlhood to the sophisticated romance of Priscilla and Elvis. Once we first meet Priscilla, she’s solely 14 years outdated, sporting a spunky ponytail and doing her homework at a soda fountain. Residing on a army base together with her household in Germany, she scores an invitation to a celebration at Presley’s residence, setting in movement the connection that will come to outline her life.

Coppola charts the insidious methods wherein Presley grooms and isolates the teenage Priscilla till she has no company over her personal life. At first, he is the right gentleman, delivering her house by curfew nightly, proscribing intimacy to hugs and chaste kisses, and striving to win over her dad and mom. However as soon as Elvis will get Priscilla to Graceland, he begins to dictate every thing from the garments she wears to the colour of her hair. Priscilla can not help falling in love with Elvis, however as he grows more and more distant and she or he finds her personal voice as a lady, she begins to see the bounds of the life he is constructed for her.

Priscilla is under no circumstances an ideal movie, but it surely’s refreshing for its mere existence — and few may have tackled the subject material with as a lot nuance as Coppola. In final 12 months’s Elvis, the character of Priscilla was diminished to a simpering bouffant, and right here, she is a completely realized human being (a notion furthered by the truth that Presley herself is a producer).

Working with manufacturing designer Tamara Deverell, Coppola crafts a exact, pink jail for Priscilla from the movie’s opening photographs that hyper-focus on an opulent flamingo-colored carpet and Priscilla’s matching toenails to the cautious software of her signature winged eyeliner that’s the embodiment of Taylor Swift lyric, “Cat eye sharp sufficient to kill a person.” A becoming parallel given each girls’s enterprise acumen and talent to commodify and interrogate the expectations of femininity.

That is exactly what Coppola is searching for to do right here. As she has achieved with every thing from The Virgin Suicides to Marie Antoinette, Coppola is a filmmaker who portrays girlhood on the Venus razor’s edge. In her arms, ladies are feral, capricious creatures, remoted by the porcelain perfection of their magnificence and societal expectations that stand at odds with the raging needs and imaginings inside their heads. That’s precisely who Priscilla is after we meet her right here — a baby fumbling towards her concept of what’s to be a grown-up.

We observe her life with Elvis from their first assembly when she was 14 to their break up when she was 28. That is a large age vary to assign to 1 actor, however Cailee Spaeny is preternatural in her capability to believably transfer from naive teen to self-possessed lady. Spaeny transforms from the portrait of teenage innocence into Elvis’ Pygmalion, earlier than lastly arriving at a spot of maturation and authenticity. She sells that gradual arc — represented so exactly by way of Priscilla’s bodily trappings of hair, style, and make-up — with sleek subtlety.

She’s matched by Jacob Elordi’s Elvis, a portrait of the “king” that feels antithetical to just about each different illustration of him that Hollywood has devised. Elordi, who’s having a hell of a 12 months with the one-two punch of this and Saltburn, by no means provides us Elvis the icon. Coppola would not let him. Sure, he is received the distinctive Memphis drawl and the shoe-polish black hair, however our solely glimpse of him as a performer is one shot of him from behind in his Vegas-era white jumpsuit. As a substitute, Elordi creates an Elvis who’s extra petulant and immature than the precise teenager he is courting. Individuals will certainly be keen to match his efficiency to Austin Butler’s Oscar-nominated flip in Elvis, but it surely’s a futile train given how completely completely different their assignments are.

There is a soulfulness to Elordi’s portrayal, too; it is not troublesome to see why Priscilla can be enamored with an older, well-known man doting on her and claiming she was the one lady who may perceive him. This rendering of Elvis makes it clear that it was his loneliness and misplaced boy power that drew him to Priscilla within the first place. In his extra tender scenes, he’s equally a baby, a boy who has misplaced his mom and who surrounds himself with rough-housing good outdated boys. However Elordi’s towering 6’5″ body (overshadowing Elvis’ reported six-foot top) helps him activate a jukebox dime, the misplaced little boy lashing out with a menace laced with the brutality of Fifties notions of manhood.

At its coronary heart, Priscilla is a narrative of loneliness — the peculiar, bottomless model of it that comes solely with the expertise of being extra picture than particular person. Abroad in Germany, it’s their homesickness that first unites Priscilla and Elvis, however it’s that very same gnawing sense of abandonment that finally drives them aside. As soon as she relocates to Memphis, Priscilla just isn’t permitted to type bonds together with her friends due to her ties to Elvis. However her schoolwork additionally isolates her from the adults who encompass her. Slowly however absolutely, Elvis seeks to get rid of any unique thought she may need — dictating what she wears, how she kinds her hair, educating her to shoot, and worst of all, indoctrinating her into his pharmaceutical routine of uppers and downers. He builds her a gilded cage constructed out of hairspray, eyeliner, and amphetamines.

She turns into his doll, dressing in lacy, satin nighties and taking boudoir images that replicate a cliched concept of sexuality reasonably than a second of connection that’s in any method attractive. With heartbreaking readability, Spaeny showcases the methods wherein Priscilla turns into a picture of affection and marriage for Elvis to undertaking to the world, significantly in a second when she applies her eyeliner with a chilling serenity whereas actively in labor.

However whereas Priscilla nails its first two acts and the sparks of rebel that can finally allow Priscilla to set herself free, it would not dig deep sufficient in its third act. It sidesteps well-documented affairs Priscilla had, which is neither right here nor there. However most crucially, it provides us no clear sense of how or why Priscilla finds herself. “You are dropping me to a lifetime of my very own,” she tells Elvis when she asks to be launched from their marriage. However we scarcely get a way of that, exterior of some transient scenes of karate classes and dinners with associates.

Priscilla, as she is now, is a power to be reckoned with — instantly following their divorce, she opened her personal clothes boutique. It’s Priscilla who has saved the flame of Elvis’ legacy burning, because the founder and president of Elvis Presley Enterprises, following his demise. Whereas that model of her was undoubtedly unearthed through gradual awakening, it is disappointing to see Priscilla’s journey towards company given quick shrift in her personal story.

Coppola desires us to know the methods wherein Priscilla grew to become as a lot a artistic undertaking as certainly one of Elvis’ songs or movies, and she or he does so ingeniously. Elvis, probably through Colonel Parker (who’s nothing greater than an offscreen presence right here), grooms Priscilla to promote a specific model of domesticity and womanhood. However Coppola glosses over what makes Priscilla most fascinating: the methods wherein the lady discovered methods to take care of her affiliation with Elvis whereas additionally absolutely turning into her personal individual.

The ultimate scene of the movie, brilliantly accompanied by Dolly Parton’s unique rendition of “I Will At all times Love You” — a music Elvis sang to Priscilla the day they divorced — captures the endless bond between Elvis and Priscilla and the complexities of their relationship. It’s true that in so some ways the love between them by no means died. However it’s clear that Priscilla additionally realized to like herself, and Coppola’s movie is lacking the spark of that journey in its third act.

Priscilla took the teachings she realized from Elvis’ manipulation and management and subverted them to her personal ends (she is the one, in spite of everything, who had the power to sever their extra poisonous ties despite that enduring love); that’s the stuff of a hero’s journey, but it isn’t a part of Coppola’s story. Priscilla is incisive in its portrayal of its central relationship, but it surely wants rather less dialog, a bit extra motion in the case of its heroine’s path to self-determination. Grade: B

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