PRISCILLA
Written by Katherine Cardiff
Photos by Kaylee Scott
Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla opens with a credits sequence interspersed with short clips of the main character getting ready in her bedroom. Shots of Aqua Net hairspray and her famous winged eyeliner create the image of Priscilla’s iconic hair and makeup, while also placing the audience in an intimate setting with her before bringing us to meet 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu in an American-esque diner in Germany, where her military father is based. While the actress Cailee Spaeny is twenty-five, she convincingly portrays Priscilla at all ages, authentically maturing and losing her naivete as the film progresses. Her performance certainly remains one of the strongest points of the film.
It’s at this diner where Currie Grant, a fellow American soldier, suggests Priscilla join him at Elvis’s house under the guise that the famous singer wants to meet people from back home. Upon meeting Elvis for the first time, he is aware of both his romantic interest in her and her young age. While the ten year age gap raises blaring alarms in many present-day viewers’ minds, Coppola leaves the audience some room to decide their moral judgments on the matter by viewing the relationship in its early days through Priscilla’s youthful whimsy. However, Coppola also doesn’t let the audience forget the age difference, bringing it up in various ways throughout the beginning of the film.
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As Priscilla ages and the rose-colored lenses of youth start to fall away, Coppola portrays Elvis through a harsher lens. He controls what Priscilla wears and prevents her from having a job. He also appears prone to outbursts of anger, including throwing a chair at his then-wife after she shares her negative opinions on one of his songs. Furthermore, Priscilla frequently suspects him of having affairs. While these overt moments paint a very direct picture, there are more subtle nuances that indicate the power imbalance in the relationship, like when Elvis proposes to Priscilla by telling her they’re getting married rather than asking her.
Coppola approaches the film by allowing the audience to peek into different moments of time throughout Priscilla’s life, rather than following one storyline, which is a favorable choice for the genre. Many of these snippets show Priscilla isolated, while Elvis is off filming in Los Angeles. She paces the massive Graceland manor with her dog, a present from Elvis given to her shortly after leaving her family in Germany at seventeen. She attends classes, but fails to connect with her classmates given their hostile perception of her relationship status. Presley attempts to make friends with Elvis’s cousins, girls appearing only a few years older than her, but his dad shuts her out of the room, stating only employees of the family business are allowed in the office. When Elvis arrives home, he brings a large entourage with him. The sudden addition of that many people to Graceland would seem to bring company to Priscilla, but it's in these scenes that she appears even lonelier. She sits at the table, side-by-side with Elvis, as the conversation rattles on around her but fails to include her.
Although the film includes plenty of screen time with Jacob Elordi’s Elvis, rarely does Coppola show The King of Rock and Roll performing. Instead she chooses to focus on Elvis as the man he was outside of the stage, as Priscilla’s partner. While Elvis’s career comes up in conversation plenty of times, the scenes remain mostly tangential to his music and movies, which remains consistent with Coppola’s chosen narrative structure. While not mentioned in the film, Priscilla didn’t see Elvis perform a show until 1968, nine years after they had first met. As Elvis appears to fade away into his career, drugs, and other women, Priscilla tells him she’s leaving him as they’ve gone on to lead two separate lives.
The last shot shows Priscilla driving away through the gates of Graceland while Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” plays. The decision to end the film here serves to encourage more thought and provoke a question about which Priscilla the film title refers to - the woman behind the beehive and winged eyeliner or the one everyone knew as the wife of The King? This choice may give an inclination to the latter.
