Both a sense of entrapment and a disconnect from reality permeate the directorial career of Sofia Coppola. The Virgin Suicides, for instance, was all about a collection of teenage girls withheld from experiencing the real world. The Bling Ring was a story about ordinary teenagers searching for an exciting escape from their lives by breaking into the houses of celebrities and taking their possessions, in essence believing owning these items will make them like their famous idols. Meanwhile, Marie Antoinette recalls the life of the titular royal figure as someone totally detached from the reality of her subjects as she enjoys an existence of luxury in her lavish domicile. Even Coppola's low-key yarn 2020 On The Rocks continued these themes by following Rashida Jones as a woman trapped by the thought of her husband having an affair and bamboozled that everyone else finds her unreliable father so charming. How come nobody else can see the man she's known all her life?
These qualities, as well as a penchant for glorious production design, lending urgent verve to period pieces, and an overall empathy for complicated women characters, have made Sofia Coppola's career incredibly fascinating to watch unfold. Coppola continues her biggest thematic fascinations with Priscilla, a motion picture that chronicles the relationship between Priscilla Presley and Elvis. Much of the discussion around Priscilla will inevitably center around comparisons between it and Baz Luhrmann's 2022 feature Elvis and understandably so given that they're both distinctive creative visions about one of the most prolific American musicians of all time. However, in the middle of all that discussion, let's also not forget to appreciate Priscilla as a standalone piece of art and another triumphant feather in Sofia Coppola's artistic cap.
Priscilla begins in 1959, as a fourteen-year-old Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny) is invited to attend a party involving Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi). At this shindig, Elvis begins to immediately express a fondness for Priscilla, a relationship that Coppola frames from the start as incredibly creepy. The exchanges between a grown man and a 9th-grader are usually rendered by Coppola and cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd through these wide shots that go on and on. The lengthy nature of these images, particularly one chronicling the duo's first Christmas together, emphasizes the incredible awkwardness and stiffness between these two people. These are not starstruck lovers, this is a relationship built on an incredibly inappropriate and off-balance power dynamic from the start. This concept is impressively rendered in Coppola's hands while the emphasis on Elvis as a self-infatuated guy with a tendency for murmuring provides a great contrast to typical hagiographic pop culture portrayals of "The King."
From here, Priscilla chronicles its titular lead getting swept up in the life of Elvis Presley and becoming his go-to lover, to the point that she's asked to come stay at Graceland. This location is one we've all seen on postcards, in films, everywhere imaginable. Its go-to visual aura is one of cozy Americana, it's a depiction of lavish living that we're supposed to wish we could have. Within this story, though, Graceland is quickly transformed into a prison. It isn't long before Priscilla Presley finds that her life as Elvis's spouse is endlessly constrictive. She can't even play with her dog outside without being told not to "make a spectacle of yourself" while she's forbidden to have a job or bring any of her friends over. "No outsiders at Graceland," she's told. It's classic abusive behavior, cutting off your partner's external life so that they can only find value in you.
Its truly impressive how well Coppola and company transform the interior of Graceland, a place we've seen all our lives in media as so ritzy and glamorous, into feeling like such a suffocating nightmare. The emptiness of this vast space (captured in haunting wide shots) serves as a visual extension of how hollow Priscilla feels inside navigating this toxic relationship. An especially harrowing depiction of how draining and insulting this experience is for Priscilla comes in an early sequence showing her sitting down at a dinner table with Elvis and his cohorts. At this bustling meal, the camera lingers on just Priscilla's face as nobody asks her any questions about herself or even really acknowledges her existence. Cailee Spaeny does remarkable work communicating with the gentlest twitches of her face this sense of unease, of recognizing that she's being ignored. There are so many people around her, she's sitting next to one of the most famous singers of all-time...yet she's never felt so alone. It's a heartbreaking moment that offers such a subtle but moving window into Priscilla Prelsey's soul.
Speaking of her, Cailee Spaney is outstanding here as Priscilla Presley. Back in 2018, Spaeny suddenly showed up in four separate movies (Pacific Rim Uprising, Bad Times at the El Royale, On the Basis of Sex, and Vice), an abrupt uptick in cinematic appearences that had me wondering what was going on. No offense to Spaney's work in any of those films (she's pretty good in El Royale), it just led me to wonder "why is Hollywood so fixated on this one actor?" Priscilla is basically a feature-length demonstration of how there's been so much hype surrounding Spaeney. Whether it's handling the subtlest yet most meaningful pieces of body language from Priscilla or accurately portraying this woman across multiple stages of her life, Spaeny crushes the assignment. Playing opposite her is Jacob Elordi, a dude from Euphoria that the gays and gals on the internet can't stop talking about as a new heartthrob. Props to Elordi then for subverting that image by communicating palpable intensity and intimidation in his version of Elvis, which is more reminiscent of Daniel Day-Lewis's whiny Phantom Thread character than any other version of Elvis Presley I've seen in cinema. The way Elvis is always speaking out the side of his mouth or the way Elordi delicately injects this singer's Southern twang into his vocals without lapsing into a stereotype, these are all such great details underscoring a well-realized performance. Maybe I'll also join that Jacob Elordi fan club, even after being terrified and repulsed by this man's version of Elvis Presley!
Unsurprisingly, because this is a Sofia Coppola movie, Priscilla also looks gorgeous in terms of its visuals. The color scheme of the feature is full of beautiful-looking warm colors, with those hues providing an especially interesting contrast whenever they're utilized in toxic environments like Graceland. The overwhelming utilization of bright red in a climatic scene depicting Elvis Presley's Vegas hotel domicile, for instance, is downright inspired. Similarly creative are the ways this feature indicates the passing of time exlucisvley through imagery and not through didactic dialogue, such as the depiction of endless empty plates being picked up by a housekeeper outside of Elvis and Prsicilla's bedroom. These kinds of flourishes and creative touches tend to work towards those key themes of entrapment and disconnect from reality that has always been around in the works of Sofia Coppola. Whether you explore it as a fascinating extension of that director's thematic fixations or just as a standalone piece of cinema, Priscilla is bound to impress.
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