So quickly after the discharge of Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, do we actually want one other Elvis Presley movie? Luhrmann’s maximalist pop biopic felt prefer it received the primary and final phrase on its topic, in addition to a lot of the different phrases that could possibly be squeezed in between them. However Sofia Coppola has discovered a fruitful – to not point out woozily lovely – new line of assault.
After all as its title makes plain, Priscilla isn’t centered on Elvis in any respect. Its central character, thoughtfully and tenderly performed by Cailee Spaeny, is his spouse of six years, whom he met when she was 14 years previous, and he 24, throughout his navy service. However even armed with that information, nothing can fairly put together you for a way a lot of an Elvis movie Priscilla is just not.
For one factor, having been made with out the cooperation of Elvis Presley Enterprises (Coppola tailored the movie from Priscilla Presley’s memoir), it comprises none of his songs. For an additional, there are solely snatches of efficiency right here and there: a few seconds of the 1968 Comeback Particular; a quick shot from behind on the Las Vegas Hilton stage. In the meantime, Elvis himself, performed with an aloof nonchalance by Jacob Elordi, is an indirect, typically even marginal determine – a neatly coiffed picture with unsure substance behind.
Like Coppola’s Misplaced in Translation, Marie Antoinette and Someplace, the movie is one other story of a younger girl trapped in a gilded cage – with Elvis, the generational heartthrob, serving as each Priscilla’s jailer and bait. We first encounter her as a sequence of fragments – an eyelid brushed by mascara, neatly pedicured toes sinking into coral shag-pile – earlier than the movie rewinds to 1959, the place she’s a Norman Rockwell teenage dream, sporting a pink fluffy sweater and sipping Coke, bored, on the counter of a faux-American diner on a West German navy base. Frankie Avalon’s Venus performs on the soundtrack – “Please ship a bit woman for me to thrill,” it croons – earlier than a uniformed affiliate of Elvis’s approaches and invitations her to a celebration to satisfy his well-known good friend.
Coppola and Spaeny paint Priscilla at first as a schoolgirl with an unattainable pop star crush that, much more impossibly, occurs to be reciprocated. (At 6’5, Elordi’s Elvis towers over his 5’1 bride-to-be – a distinction Coppola exploits within the body to sum up the couple’s energy dynamic.)