Sofia Coppola's sideways look at the life and marriage of Priscilla Presley lands in Irish cinemas.
Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) is a 14-year old girl living with her parents (Dagmara Dominczyk, Ari Cohen) on a US military base in Germany. When Elvis Presley, the most popular singer in the world, is drafted into military service, he soon finds himself enamoured by Priscilla and eventually marries her, despite their age difference and constant rumours of his infidelity. Nevertheless, Priscilla lives in Graceland amid the domineering presence of both Elvis' father and Elvis himself...
Sofia Coppola's work has always been in conversation with itself through the years. Even going back to 'Lost In Translation', you get a sense that there's a connection between it and 'Priscilla'. Where one was about a woman trying to find herself amid the slow rot of her marriage, 'Priscilla' approaches it from the opposite end - a woman becoming herself, and leaving behind the marriage that defined her in the process. Of course, in order to get there, it has to navigate both the infatuation that led to it and make that as convincing and as real as possible.
Again, 'Priscilla' as a story is some kind of darkened, sinister teenage romance with a dreamlike quality - again, not unlike Coppola's 'The Virgin Suicides', which saw a group of girls isolated by domineering parents, but also the intense infatuation that comes about so easily in teenage years. It's heady stuff, and very often, you get the sense that Dagmara Dominczyk's character is a stand-in for the audience, urging Cailee Spaeny to make better decisions but understanding it won't work. When the story moves to Graceland, it takes on a textured quality where the satin and the shag carpet acts like the walls of a prison as the control over every aspect of Priscilla's life just ratchets up.
Both Jacob Elordi and Cailee Spaeny are perfectly cast as Elvis and Priscilla. The infatuation feels earned and real, not all screaming crowds charging a fence at a concert but something deeper and more palpable. Elordi plays Elvs with real ease, his voice and his mannerisms never come across as forced or deliberate and while it may be more subdued than Austin Butler's version, it still has just the same resonance. As for Cailee Spaeny, the story is carried across her shoulders and we can see the full arc of her progression from teenager to woman, to eventually emancipating herself from Elvis. More than that, we can see and empathise with how easy it could have been to be sucked into that world.
Working with fewer resources than Baz Luhrmann and without the music rights, Sofia Coppola has crafted a world in a way that is both psychologically convincing, but with a gilded, dreamlike aesthetic. Everything almost feels slightly too big for Cailee Spaeny's diminutive stature. When Elordi's Elvis does enter her orbit, the world takes on a fresh colour and becomes infinitely more vivid and textured. There's a sense that Coppola has been wanting to make this kind of movie - a dark and twisted fairytale romance - for quite some time, but never found a story that matched her sensibilities. Yet in 'Priscilla', we can see a writer-director at her creative best and able to bring on a mesmerising, intoxicating story.