Shaking up the fairy tale

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This article was published 04/11/2023 (1049 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This lush, quiet, suspended film opens with a montage of surfaces.

But what surfaces — the makeup and hair, the jewelled silk kitten heels, the deep-pile carpet, the shiny cars.

Exquisitely controlled and beautiful, this (kind of) true story is also somewhat muffled, flat and anti-climactic. This feels like a deliberate choice by filmmaker Sofia Coppola, however, who adapted the script from Priscilla Presley’s autobiography. The film’s central character is someone whose inner life is obscured, whose dreams and desires are constrained, under her all-important appearance.

Coppola is not delivering a standard biopic. And she’s certainly not giving us a conventional love story, not least because when Priscilla meets Elvis, she’s in the ninth grade. She’s doing math homework. She still has toys in her room.

Instead, Priscilla is a quintessential Sofia Coppola film. The American director has always been an auteur of girlhood, drawn to young women who struggle to define themselves when the only role they have been given is to be what other people want.

She has explored this theme in films from The Virgin Suicides to Marie Antoinette, and she’s now channelling it through Priscilla Beaulieu Presley. Changing the source material’s title of Elvis and Me to Priscilla, she signals her intent to re-centre this story on the girl who met the king of rock ’n’ roll at age 14 and married him at 21.

Priscilla (played by Caillee Spaeny of Devs and Mare of Easttown) and her family are stationed on an army base in West Germany in 1959. When a young officer asks her if she likes Elvis Presley, she replies as almost any American teenager in the ’50s would: “Of course. Who doesn’t?”

Invited to a party to meet Elvis (Euphoria’s Jacob Elordi), Priscilla is at first starstruck. But when Elvis gets her alone in his room, he turns out to be needy, lonely and missing his mother, who recently died.

The two start up a chaste romance. “Promise me you’ll stay the way you are,” Elvis says to Priscilla when he leaves Germany to go back to the States. This could be an oblique reference to the girl retaining her virginity, but it ends up defining their entire relationship. Elvis wants Priscilla to remain unchanged, innocent, immaculately lovely and living for his voice at the end of a phone.

He’s trying to launch a movie career, and her job is to wait — and wait — for more than two years. When Priscilla is 17, Elvis convinces her parents to let her come and live with his family in Memphis; she’ll be enrolled in a good Catholic school, he promises them.

Priscilla just wants to be with Elvis, but there are always other people around, especially Elvis’s entourage, whom Coppola presents as indistinguishable, ever-present idiots. (Graceland, it turns out, has a certain amount in common with court life at Versailles.)

It’s hard to balance a schoolgirl’s schedule with a beau who stays up all night — often renting out roller rinks or arcades — and then stays in bed until 4 p.m. Of course, the pills to sleep and the pills to wake up help, and soon Priscilla is hooked as well.

Coppola is intent on taking romance tropes, from the meet-cute to the late-night phone conversations, and making them feel unfamiliar and strange.

Take the dressing-room montage, when Elvis takes Priscilla shopping and she comes out to model the outfits. It becomes sinister (more Hitchcock’s Vertigo than teen romcom) when Elvis turns out to have really specific ideas about what Priscilla should and shouldn’t wear.

“You’re a small girl,” he tells her later. “You gotta stay away from the prints.”

Mostly Priscilla is left to wander alone in gorgeous luxury; eventually her adolescent longing turns to confusion and finally disillusionment.

There’s a feminist subtext here, but this is not an obviously uplifting empowerment story. The narrative stays intentionally closed-in and claustrophobic, purposely inert and opaque until a very abrupt conclusion.

Elordi, as Elvis, has none of the brute charisma we saw in Austin Butler’s portrayal in Baz Luhrmann’s recent biopic, but maybe that’s the point.

Spaeny, though, is fascinating in a performance almost completely defined by negative space. Priscilla speaks only in response to others, reacts only to what others do. She is not allowed to feel what she feels, but her loneliness gradually seeps to the surface, becoming the sad centre of this dream-like film.

alison.gillmor@winnipegfreepress.com