Sofia Coppola's Priscilla will be very uncomfortable viewing for Elvis fans – review – The Independent

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Priscilla, Sofia Coppola’s telling of the courtship of the 14-year-old Priscilla Presley née Beaulieu by the 24-year previous Elvis, will make uncomfortable viewing for followers of The King. It reveals him in a removed from flattering mild, as an insecure narcissist fixated on a teenage lady and unwilling to permit his younger spouse any independence. The movie, endorsed by Presley herself and tailored from her ebook Elvis and Me (which she co-wrote with Sandra Harmon), is a downbeat and dour affair, with little of the exuberance of Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis final yr.

“We’re main separate lives,” Priscilla (Mare of Easttown’s Cailee Spaeny) tells Elvis (Euphoria’s Jacob Elordi) towards the top of the film, which has had its world premiere in competitors on the Venice Movie Competition. In truth, although, she at all times appeared to exist on the periphery of his world – ever since they first met whereas she was enrolled in a German highschool, with Elvis visiting as a part of his stint within the US military. When Priscilla is first requested over to Elvis’s home, piercing her lifetime of restlessness and tedium within the course of, she leaps on the likelihood of some pleasure. Her father, a army officer, is at first extraordinarily reluctant to permit her to hang around with Elvis and his associates. However as soon as he’s reassured that his daughter shall be strictly chaperoned, he relents.

Elvis towers over Priscilla. She’s a schoolgirl and he’s successfully grooming her. They’ve lengthy talks and shortly change into shut. He’s grieving the current dying of his mom and sees Priscilla, despite her youth, as somebody to open up to. Elordi makes a good stab at taking part in Elvis. He has the voice and physique for the position, however lacks his attraction and vulnerability. From the outset, he tries to regulate Priscilla, telling her what to put on and insisting she dye her hair black.

Upon returning to the US along with her household, Priscilla assumes Elvis has forgotten about her, till she is summoned to Memphis to affix him at his residence. At occasions, as she lives alone and uncared for in Elvis’s mansion, Priscilla appears extra like a heroine in a cold Gothic novel by the Bronte sisters than somebody in a film a few rock ‘n’ roll star.

Spaeny offers a compelling and shifting efficiency as the brilliant younger lady whose spirit is slowly crushed. Elvis’s father Vernon is imply and merciless to her. When she visits the workplace to shoot the breeze together with his secretaries, he scolds her for distracting them from their work. Elvis himself is ceaselessly heading off to Hollywood to make motion pictures, leaving her behind. When he’s at residence, he spends a lot of his time ingesting and capturing pool together with his male hangers-on, the so-called “Memphis Mafia”.

When Elvis turns into involved in crackpot non secular concepts, he calls for Priscilla comply with him on his non secular journey. At one stage, they take psychedelic medicine collectively. Regardless of his obsession with Priscilla, Elvis doesn’t have intercourse along with her. If something, she appears keener to sleep with him than he does along with her. Ultimately, when Priscilla is 21, they marry and have a daughter, Lisa Marie, however her arrival doesn’t make him any extra attentive to her.

Little or no Elvis music is heard on the soundtrack. As an alternative, Coppola opens the movie with The Ramones’ “Child I Love You” as Priscilla places on her false nails and eyelashes. The Colonel, Elvis’s famously slippery supervisor performed in final yr’s Elvis by Tom Hanks, can be talked about however by no means seen.

The director tells her topic’s story briefly, self-contained episodes which don’t at all times hyperlink to one another and aren’t at all times totally defined. All the things is seen from Priscilla’s perspective. She is a younger lady rising up within the strangest atmosphere conceivable. Her Elvis may be very totally different from the rock star the complete world appears to like.

In her personal coolly analytical approach, Coppola makes some trenchant factors about the best way Priscilla is managed by the boys in her life. She resides in a gilded cage. The wealth and luxurious she experiences don’t compensate for her full lack of freedom. And whereas Elvis could certainly have been the King, his court docket – on the proof right here – was a really dreary place certainly.

Dir: Sofia Coppola. Starring: Cailee Spaeny, Jacob Elordi, Dagmara Dominczyk. 110 minutes.

‘Priscilla’ is in chosen UK cinemas from 26 December, and opens broadly on 1 January

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