Coppola operates with tender precision in Priscilla
When considering last year’s Baz Luhrmann film Elvis (if you will humor me for a moment), it’s a challenge to identify a more tonal antithesis than Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla. Where Elvis is noisy and energetic, Priscilla is quiet and mellow. Where Elvis is over-the-top and wide-reaching, Priscilla is narrow and understated. They are two vastly different films focused on two vastly different characters. Priscilla, though, is the better film. The comparisons are inevitable, despite their distinct objectives. Priscilla represents a delicate portrayal of Priscilla Presley’s experience with Elvis, from meetup to breakup, almost exclusively from her point of view.
Priscilla is another two-hander by writer/director Sofia Coppola, following On the Rocks (2020), Somewhere (2010), and Lost in Translation (2003). She excels at exploring the social subtleties between two soul-searching individuals. In the case of Priscilla, the two individuals are Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny, Mare of Easttown) and Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi, Euphoria). The film is based on Priscilla’s memoir Elvis and Me. Both the book and the film follow the chronological events from her first flirtatious meeting with Elvis in Germany in 1959, where he and Priscilla’s father were both stationed, to the beginning of their split in 1972. Their age difference was widely publicized and analyzed — she was 14 and he was 24 when they first met. The film doesn’t shy away from these facts. Instead, Coppola uses Priscilla’s growth during her relationship with Elvis, from teenager to adult, to mirror the evolution and destruction of their relationship.
To emphasize Priscilla’s predicament, Coppola and director of photography Philippe Le Sourd, whom she’s worked with twice before, utilize minimal camera moves and restricted views of locations to insinuate Priscilla’s claustrophobia. At her home in Germany, and Graceland in Memphis, the camera repeatedly captures only segments of rooms. In this way, we feel contained and controlled, as if the other rooms of the house don’t even exist. Bedroom scenes are noticeably filmed from Elvis’s side of the bed, with Priscilla positioned in the back, behind the action. By my count, there are only three or four short scenes in which Priscilla isn’t present or within earshot. The result is a restricted narrative, but its tenderness allows the relationship’s moments of romance and toxicity to feel truthful (not to suggest that they aren’t). It’s clever filmmaking that sharply, if quietly, comments on the characters’ clashing desires.
Spaeny and Elordi are superb. And for the record, if I had to choose an Elvis, I’d select Elordi’s performance over Austin Butler’s Oscar-nominated portrayal from last year. Spaeny and Elordi perform within the film’s sense of aloneness with electric chemistry and emotional maturity. The height difference is notable and at times distracting, considering Elordi is about five inches taller than Elvis, and Spaeny is about four inches shorter than Priscilla (depending on your source), so the extreme height disparity makes the age difference that much more jarring. None of this detracts from the film’s effectiveness. Priscilla is Coppola’s auteurist vision, one that washes over you. Then, like Priscilla in 1972, the film becomes more aware of what’s going on.
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Priscilla opens in theaters on Friday, November 3rd.
