Sofia Coppola adapted the memoirs of Priscilla Presley
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“Priscilla: Elvis and Me” by Sofia Coppola is released. The film is based on the memoirs of Priscilla Presley, who decided in the 1980s, after the death of the king of rock and roll, to tell the story of her love and parting with the idol of millions. Cailee Spaeny won a prize at the Venice Film Festival for her starring role in this sleek film.
September 1959, West Germany. The adopted daughter of an American Air Force captain, Priscilla (Caileigh Spaeny), receives an invitation to the party of the king of rock and roll, Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi). He is serving in the armored forces and is terribly homesick – so 14-year-old Priscilla from Texas must dispel the melancholy that her grandmother and a flock of loyal fans cannot cope with. It will turn out that six months later Elvis will be demobilized almost in the status of Priscilla’s future groom. Priscilla Presley will set out the details of a long platonic romance, and then a wedding and divorce, which would lead to a move from Germany to Graceland sanctioned by her parents, in her autobiographical book “Elvis and Me,” published years after the death of the king. There will be descriptions of innocent dates and spiritual quests, psychotropic drugs and stellar outbursts of anger – in general, everything that is expected of a book that offers a look behind the facade of success and prosperity, but in certainly gentle dosages and formulations. So that no one, God forbid, thinks anything bad.
It is these restrained memoirs, artlessly varnishing the rough reality, that Sofia Coppola is filming. Priscilla Presley is not just a heroine. She’s one of the film’s producers, so perhaps you shouldn’t be too surprised by the cool opaqueness of the picture, where the camera loves to look at carpets and furniture, admires porcelain trinkets, genuinely enjoys the lawn and turns away in time so that nothing objectionable gets into the frame. This is how yesterday’s crumbs are swept under the sofa. It was and was. This is a movie of omissions. At times the film goes dark without turning off the sound and subtitles, so you can’t help but wonder if our distributors have edited something for the sake of a distribution certificate and in the name of compliance with the latest laws. If so, then the domestic theatrical version only continues and aggravates the line taken by the authors. This is quite in keeping with the spirit of the film, where there was no room for any scandalous or toxic details, conspiracy theories or wonderful asides in the spirit of Baz Luhrmann’s daring biography of Elvis, released in 2022.
“Priscilla: Elvis and Me” is a literal implementation of the tested and approved text. Coppola glances at the details contained in it, as if turning over the pages of a girl’s album with profiles for girlfriends, awkward poems, newspaper clippings and a herbarium. She encourages her viewers to set up similar optics. And indeed, confused at first by the schoolgirl’s rapprochement with the singer, the gaze quickly adapts in order to catch grains of life and truth in this project, well packaged in synthetics in the fashion of the sixties. The truth is nearby: in the eyelashes that the main character dyes before going to the maternity hospital, in some trembling of a lace nightgown, which you must comb your hair to put on, in the out of sync between reality and ideas about it. The truth is that the story of Priscilla and Elvis was told primarily from Elvis’s point of view, and Sofia Coppola is finally telling it the way the main character would have wanted. Perhaps, by moderating his authorial arrogance and ambitions, or maybe not particularly so – after all, the director’s filmography, which includes “Lost in Translation” and “Marie Antoinette,” confirms that Coppola has long been studying heroines bored in golden cages with some success and inevitably growing from these cells.
Perhaps the best thing about this film is 25-year-old Cailee Spaeny who plays the role of Priscilla. The actress was deservedly rewarded by the jury of the Venice Film Festival – she is extremely convincing in her on-screen maturation, going in two hours from a 14-year-old doll to an adult woman leaving the gates of Graceland to “I Will Always Love You” in an authentic performance by Dolly Parton. Whitney Houston would later make this composition about lost love an unforgettable hit. The words of this song about bitter and sweet memories left in the ashes of great feelings ironically reveal the essence of the film and, perhaps, polemicize with Elvis’s hit, which demanded to love him tenderly and forever.
Spaeny has a lot to play for. It’s much more difficult for her partner, the sweet and nasty Australian Jacob Elordi, who has gained incredible momentum. He has to turn into a hero who is in no way similar to a living, feeling person, into the standard Ken from the Mattel doll box (he does it, perhaps, better than Ryan Gosling in “Barbie”). His Elvis is handsome, glossy – a totem and phantom from girls’ dreams. And the further the timing goes, the more Elordi becomes more wooden in this fictitious puppet surroundings. This, of course, makes it clearer why they separated, or rather, where: he was pupating in his stage image, and she, on the contrary, opened the door to ventilate and accidentally ended up on the street. “We live different lives.” Well, if after watching “Priscilla” the viewer wants to follow the heroine and unwind, I would recommend turning on the “Naked Gun” trilogy at home, in which Elvis’s ex-wife with amazing comic talent played the role of detective Drebin’s lover. From Elvis Presley to Leslie Nielsen is a good route.
In theaters from January 25
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