Priscilla review: A tender portrait of life lived under Elvis Presley's shadow

Cailee Spaeny is stunning in a star-manufacturing turn in 'Priscilla' that asks her to internalise the woman’s conflicted legacy, as opposed to give it a clear utterance. (Screen grab/YouTube/A24)

In a scene from Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, the young subject of the film summons a polite inquest into her financial standing at the Presley estate. She doesn’t exactly want money, but a small-time career, a job, something to do. “You’ve got a career now, baby. You need to be there when I call for you,” Elvis tells her politely but dismissively over the phone. It’s a snapshot of what a young, fragile, star-struck girl’s life can turn into once you are past the point of erotising a privilege. With ripening age and familiarity comes the humbling knowledge of the many fiefdoms that come up around famous, powerful men. And the bit-part a woman can be relegated to play in exchange for the opportunity to intimately witness it. It’s greatness alright, but it comes at many silent costs. To which effect, Coppola’s film is a tender, discomfiting, if incomplete exploration of life lived under the shadow of a flawed superstar.

Cailee Spaeny plays Priscilla, a 15-year-old schoolgirl living off of a military base in Germany. She is invited by Presley’s friend to a party at his house. The rather uncomfortable invite is never quite rationalised, but only formally approved by juxtaposing parental protocols (be home by 10, etc.).

Presley, played by the adequate Jacob Elordi, is framed a proper gentleman as opposed to the world-conquering hot-headed musician he is developing to be. He eyes the little girl from a distance, pursues her with the deftness of a man aware of the awkwardness between the two and finally has her, in ways that make their relationship as bizarre as it also seems fulfilling.

Based on Priscilla’s book Elvis and Me, the narrative begins as a fantasy. This is after all a life most women smitten by the rock-star would have killed to live. Priscilla quietly absorbs the adulation, the sheer awe and madness of a schoolgirl having risen to such curious fame. She lives a bit of that fantasy at first, being treated like a princess at his estate and then visualising it back at school. The relationship itself is a wistful, at times unsettling mix of emotional distance and unusual physical intimacy. Presley withholds sex, but also fetishizes her. He adores her but also remains distant on tour, and in the arms of other women we only see through the headlines Priscilla reads about them.

Coppola’s direction is assured enough to never allow this film to become about the man. We don’t see or hear, for the most part, any of Presley’s tantalising performances. Here he is the myth, concocted by his docile wife’s longing for him. At least that’s the version she sees slowly disappear from view.

There is plenty to like about Coppola’s latest in a long line of affronted, socially paralysed female figures. In one scene, after Presley asks her if she likes a soundtrack, her confusion and naivety consequences in a chair being hurled at her. There is the casual substance abuse, the infantilising of her needs and wants, and the visible strain between two humans starved by a lack of communication and maybe even commonness. But then, what would they talk about, what could she say? The silence, the unknowns fill the gap as the film also steers clear of interrogating the relationship for causality as opposed to effect and obvious outcomes. It’s probably where Coppola’s writing and direction underserves a subject that could so easily be more complicated, fertile and wholesome.

Elvis and Priscilla with newborn Lisa Marie, February 1968. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

All that said, Priscilla is still moving and poignant. Spaeny is stunning in a star-manufacturing turn that asks her to internalise the woman’s conflicted legacy, as opposed to give it a clear utterance. We see a young flower bloom, be plucked by time and wither away, not with a storm but the gradual realisation that stardom uproots the soil it is meant to take nourishment from. It’s as classical a trope as it also feels foolishly repetitive. But then that is what attention, power and agency like no man has seen before, can do to you. It makes you think you are in control. For the most part Presley does have this religious hold over Priscilla’s life, her sense of self.

On some level this is also a coming-of-age tale, a graceful, but commanding response to the prevailing vein of masculinity that interprets the arrival of fame as some sort of life-warping victory. Everything has its costs. Some are slowly accrued over a lifetime. Others gradually present themselves, like the newly developed shadows on the wall, in the summer sun. Not because the shape or the being of things has changed. But because displacement and distance themselves become lenses to review relationships and status quos through.

Priscilla isn’t Coppola’s most coherent or provocative film, but it is a commendable addition to the pantheon of cinema dedicated to the singing superstar. Considering it comes only a year after Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, it feels like a sobering, and necessary reset.