PRISCILLA. (2023) WRITTEN, DIRECTED AND CO-PRODUCED BY SOFIA COPPOLA.
STARRING CAELIE SPAENY AND JACOB ELORDI.
BASED ON THE BOOK, ELVIS AND ME, BY PRISCILLA PRESLEY.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
I watched this one recently and I can’t help feeling a tad disappointed. Never mind the Baz Luhrmann fantasy, they told me. Wait for the much grittier, blood-and-guts tell-all from Sofia Coppola, coming soon. Well, I waited and I did enjoy it, and I was even entertained at times, but I was also bored, especially in the first half of the film during that seemingly interminable courtship.
In 1959, Elvis is in the U.S. army, stationed in Germany, and he meets a cripplingly shy, teenage Priscilla when one of his army mates brings her along to a get-together at Elvis’s house.
Priscilla, in Germany with her own army family, falls for the handsome, already famous singer immediately. Why wouldn’t she? She’s an impressionable little girl, and I’m sure he was well aware of the effect he had on women.
Despite the ten-year age gap, Elvis takes to the fourteen-year-old and they start a relationship, though they save the sex for the wedding night, apparently. This is at Elvis’s insistence, though I always thought he was as randy as all-get-out when it came to the wimmin. Was some sort of sexual dysfunction at work here, or genuinely a type of moral prudishness? Who knows?
The scenes of Priscilla going endlessly back and forth to her parents’ house and to school after being with Elvis are immensely tiresome to watch, so no doubt they were equally so for the real Priscilla to go through in real life. Things don’t change much when she gets to Graceland. Except the young Priscilla, that is…
Elvis, a decade older and with a domineering personality, tells Priscilla to dye her hair black and wear more of the black eye-up that was the style of the time. He chooses her clothes and a lot of the movie is just Priscilla parading ever taller hair and differently-patterned ‘sixties dresses for Elvis’s- and even his hangers-on’s- edification. I wonder how Priscilla felt about the constant presence of the so-called ‘Memphis Mafia’ in their lives and in their marriage…?
The worst part of the marriage was probably Elvis’s frequent absences. He went to film sets and on tour and on little jollies to Las Vegas, and he never allowed little wifey to come with.
‘I need to know you’re at home waiting for me, baby,’ he tells her in his trademark mumble, and that just about sums up Priscilla Beaulieu’s part in their marriage.
It also hurt her immeasurably to read in the papers about Elvis’s romances with his co-stars, women like Nancy Sinatra and Ann-Margret. Elvis usually denies all wrongdoing, but other times he confesses and says it was just ‘one of those things,’ usually an on-set romance, I would say.
His moods were unpredictable and sometimes violent, especially when he was arguing with his manager, Colonel Tom Parker (who doesn’t feature in this movie at all except as a voice we don’t hear on the phone), or brooding over the fact that he only got sent a certain type of light, sunshine-y movie script that involved the wearing of Hawaiian shirts and flower garlands round the neck, rather than anything more weighty.
He also introduced her to pills and drugs that would ‘help’ her to ‘keep up’ with the pace of life as his wife, but drug-taking didn’t agree with her. She just wanted a nice cosy domestic life with the man she loved and their baby, Lisa-Marie, and it simply wasn’t sustainable.
I’m leaving you, she says, and he mutters something incomprehensible and then she leaves. End of. A bit anti-climactic after all the hype but still an entertaining enough one-time watch.
Priscilla, just going by this film, doesn’t seem to have had a huge amount of personality, just looks and youth. Still, I guess that was enough for Elvis, who had charisma enough for both of them, or so I’m told. I guess the actor who played him, though undoubtedly good-looking, was holding back a little in this film.
sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris 