Priscilla — A Review
Film: Priscilla. Year: 2023. Genre: Biography/Drama/Music. Director: Sofia Coppola.
Sofia Coppola has long been interested in aesthetics. Her films embody the kind of girly femininity rooted in pastels, sadness, and opulence that the internet has named the coquette aesthetic. It doesn’t always work out well for Coppola. When Marie Antoinette was released in 2006, it was sent through the spike because of its sacrifice of historical accuracy at the altar of aesthetics. But when Coppola does manage to cohabit her eye for visuals with a plot that is suitable for it, what we end up with is Priscilla.
Based on the real-life Priscilla Presley’s book ‘My Life with Elvis’, Priscilla manages to capture the essence of our subject matter— a shy teenage girl who, for better or for worse, caught the attention of a powerful and charismatic man. Elvis is big — literally, as much as metaphorically, as Jacob Elordi’s tall stature towering over Cailee Spaeny’s 5'1 would tell you. It shows the sheer influence and dominance he had over her in all aspects there were. As the movie progresses, Elvis increasingly leans into his rock stardom. Contrast the scene when he first meets Priscilla to the last few scenes preceding their divorce — in the former, Elvis is a shy army boy; he stutters when he speaks to her and has a tenderness in his eyes. By the end of the movie, he walks around in flowing capes and bright, sharp colours, even as he increasingly loses touch with his reality, slipping into a drug-fuelled twilight of toxic masculinity and insecurities.
The movie, unlike Elvis, is quaint. If Elvis is big and loud, the movie is gentle and quiet, reflecting more of Priscilla than Elvis in its colour palettes and storytelling. Often, scenes repeat. The second time Elvis meets Priscilla, he asks her if she would like to go to his room.
“You don’t have to be scared, baby. I’ll never do anything to harm you.”
When she does go, the room is small and subdued, essentially suburban. Brigette Bardot is half-naked on a poster on the wall for one of her raunchy French comedy films, and there is, of course, a letter from Anita Wood, replete with a lipstick kiss stain.
Then, when the scene repeats, years later when they meet again, the room has changed. Gone are the teenage boy posters and love notes. They were replaced with expensive figurines, chandeliers, and rich, thick colours — fit for a king, which was what Elvis was becoming by then.
Much of the transformation happens to the characters in this repetition and lack of ‘plot’. Priscilla barely utters anything throughout the movie; when she does, it’s mere whispers. Her anger and outbursts are wisps in comparison to Elvis. When Elvis comments on one of Priscilla’s dresses, she has her first outburst.
“I’ll return the fucking dress then,” she yells in favour of herself for the first time. Elvis, lying on the bed, having just woken up, laughs with amusement. For him, this wasn’t some significant moment of Priscilla asserting her independence. It was more of a toddler throwing a tantrum for something dismissable and silly. So he chuckles like an indulgent father.
The perversity of their age gap is sprinkled into the plot in the form of random dialogues. But the idea that Elvis was a groomer with pedophilic tendencies is never touched upon, at least not openly. But that still doesn’t prevent you from getting a bad taste in your mouth every time he calls his wife ‘little one’. And when they do get a ‘little one’, Elvis starts to distance himself from Priscilla. Now, having lost her virginal qualities, Elvis no longer desired to have her and thus lost the desire to control her.
Motherhood is a defining moment in Priscilla’s life. Elvis’s loss of interest in her enables her to ask for more — move to L.A. with her daughter, learn martial arts, and wear what she wants. Taking care of another brings her out of her prolonged infancy. She grows into what she wasn’t allowed to be for a long time — a woman.
In a sense, Priscilla is a coming-of-age story, as Coppola’s films often are. It is myopic in its perspective — it doesn’t bother to touch on Elvis’s psyche. Perhaps it is this narrowness of vision that makes it so successful. It makes Elvis’s mood swings and outbursts all the more off-putting. When, after almost twenty minutes in screentime of ignoring Priscilla, Elvis summons her to a hotel room only to attempt to assault her while whispering, ‘I wanna show you how a real man makes love to his woman’; who knows what he was thinking? We are never given an explanation, as she often isn’t either. This single-minded focus on the woman’s perspective in cinema is still fresh enough for Priscilla to succeed in what it sets out to do — to paint the picture of a woman who was thrown into an extraordinary romance with a rockstar and to tell their story the way she knows it, and nothing more.
