By Sandra Hall
PRISCILLA ★★★½
(M) 110 minutes
Sofia Coppola has an affinity with a particular kind of beleaguered teenager, princesses trapped in towers so palatial it takes them a while to discover the unhappiness within. The best-known example is her Marie Antoinette, portrayed as an 18th century high school queen bee, surrounded by acolytes who enthusiastically share her delight in the pleasures of Versailles until fate and the Revolution take over.
Cailee Spaeney plays Priscilla Presley in Sofia Coppola’s biopic, which is based in Presley’s memoir, Elvis and Me.Credit: Nixco
Coppola has mentioned Marie Antoinette when talking about her new film Priscilla. This time, the princess is Priscilla Presley and her Versailles is Elvis’s palace, Graceland, where she was installed at the age of 17 after attracting The King’s attention three years earlier.
The film is an adaptation of Elvis and Me, Priscilla’s memoir of their relationship. Before her death last year, their daughter Lisa Marie Presley came down heavily on Coppola’s script for being too harsh on her father. But her mother, who has an executive producer’s credit, has been promoting it while taking care to stress she went on loving her ex-husband long after their divorce.
Coppola’s is certainly not a pretty picture of Elvis and his attitude to the guileless 14-year-old schoolgirl he started dating in Germany when he was doing his military service.
It’s not that he exploits her sexually. One of the stranger aspects of their love affair is the fact it was unconsummated long after she reached the age of consent. Presley has said she remained chaste until their wedding night when she was 21.
Jacob Elordi as Elvis and Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla. The film covers their life together from when Priscilla was 14 years old. Credit: AP
Until then, according to the film, she led a Rapunzel-like existence while he was off making films, doing concert tours and flirting with his co-stars. Although he had her enrolled in high school, she made no friends and after graduating, Elvis’s bad-tempered father made it clear she was not allowed to take a job lest she violate house rules by indulging in idle chat about her personal life.
Coppola evokes all this in persuasive detail. As Priscilla, Cailee Spaeny effortlessly spans her journey from wide-eyed adolescence to disillusioned young womanhood, while Australia’s Jacob Elordi, fresh from his turn as an insouciant young aristocrat in Saltburn, has no difficulty in evoking Elvis’s glamour.
He gets the voice, the accent and the fluid grace that characterised Elvis in his heyday. We don’t see him perform. Coppola could not get the rights to the songs, but the soundtrack is infused with the music of the period and to carry on the analogy, it’s easy to see the household at Graceland as a royal court.
When the king is in residence, his courtiers, including the jesters, arrive with him and things liven up, but there are obligations as well.
Possessing definite views on how princesses should look and conduct themselves, Elvis presides over a radical make-over, insisting Priscilla take to false eyelashes, dye her hair black and tease it into a lofty bouffant. Her outfits are chosen for her and if she dares to back her own taste, the results invariably get a thumbs down.
When she finally breaks free, realising there is a future to be had outside the confines of the kingdom, we should be cheering for her, but Coppola’s success in conjuring the tedium of her Graceland life turns out to be perversely counter-productive.
The tedium has shaped the storyline and Priscilla’s passivity in response to having her looks altered, and her personality erased, isn’t exactly endearing. She finally cracks when Elvis takes to the bible, subjecting her to bedtime readings punctuated by his musings on his need to find a higher calling. It’s all too much, she tells him in a mild show of rebelliousness, which comes too late in the day to deliver the shot of energy the movie so desperately needs.
Priscilla is released in cinemas on January 18.
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