Director Sofia Coppola’s 2023 film, Priscilla, joins a long list of highly acclaimed movies that often tell the stories of privileged white women, with films such as The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette under her directing belt, Priscilla was nothing new to Coppola.
Based on Priscilla Presley’s memoir of her time dating Elvis Presley, Elvis & Me, Priscilla takes place in the 1960s. The movie itself takes a different and rather darker tone as to how the King of Rock and Roll is often portrayed, given Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis came out just shy of a year ago. In Priscilla, played by Cailee Spaeny, we take a journey through the life that Priscilla Presley lived before and after marrying into her romantic and often rocky relationship with Elvis Presley, played by Jacob Elordi. Their separation came towards the end of the film where her leaving Elvis led to the ending credits as Dolly Parton’s cover of Whitney Huston’s “I Will Always Love You” played the movie out. The movie itself focuses on Priscilla as she handles the glitz, glamor, and infidelity that come with dating and marrying an international singer and actor.
The film opens with Priscilla getting ready, applying false eyelashes and eyeliner, a preview of her life to come. In the beginning, Priscilla is 14, in middle school, and living with her parents in Germany as her stepfather has been stationed there. By the end of the movie, Priscilla is 28, has a daughter named Lisa-Marie Presley, and ends the movie by driving away from Graceland, Elvis’ 200,000 square foot mansion.
When the movie started, I was surprised by the lack of storytelling there was in the movie, the absence being filled with visual storytelling. Something Priscilla did well, in my opinion, was rather than explaining to the audience what is occurring, the film shows its audience and often trusts its audience to interpret what is happening, as we see through Priscilla’s lens.
Throughout the film, I grew to appreciate and love some of Coppola’s uses of a variety of cinematic techniques to emulate the loneliness and isolation Priscilla felt when dating the King. In most shots, the camera solely focuses on Priscilla even after something big has happened with Elvis, a significant example of this being when Elvis throws a chair in Priscilla’s direction, nearly hitting her, and the viewer is solely focused on Priscilla’s face as she begins what has just happened, frantically trying to compose herself. With these recurring shots, a sad feeling is heavily conveyed as we are meant to feel the solitude Priscilla felt when she was away from Elvis, which was for most of the movie. Even when she was with Elvis, her loneliness only crept up faster as the happy moments in their relationship grew shorter and his absence grew longer.
I often found myself noticing a technique Sofia Coppola knows all too well: color. Priscilla is shown maturing through the color of her wardrobe. In the beginning, we see Priscilla with very soft pinks, minimal makeup, and natural, coffee-brown hair, meant to signify her innocence and girlhood as she navigates her rocky world as a 14-year-old girl. Once she starts dating Elvis, Priscilla completely changes and starts wearing dark blues and blacks, dying her hair black, wearing it high with an enormous amount of volume, and often seen sporting heavy eye makeup in the process of her transformation. Towards the end of the movie, Priscilla starts deflecting from Elvis’ vision, reverting to wearing warmer colors such as brown, a color Elvis hated. Her long hair became a hazelnut brown color, showcasing Priscilla’s newfound liberty as she became free from Elvis’ control.
The film itself is pretty quick in the sense that although the movie is just under 2 hours, we only see what Priscilla saw and felt. One minute we see Priscilla graduating high school and the next, we see her with her daughter, mirroring her fast-paced life.
I thoroughly enjoyed the movie as I saw a clear power shift where Elvis became involved in every aspect of Priscilla’s life to the extent that he played virtually every role in her life: father, caretaker, and husband. In the majority of the film, Elvis seems to make all of the decisions Priscilla otherwise should’ve made for herself like shutting her down when she wanted to be intimate, deciding when they should get married, and if she could work a job, despite him being absent for most of the movie.
Something I appreciated in Priscilla is how the film was able to showcase the negative side that Elvis had when marrying Priscilla Presley. There were so many instances where she, as the woman, had to be passive and complacent to please his idea of what it meant to be feminine. For instance, when they playfought and Priscilla hits Elvis too hard, Elvis reacts by lashing out at her and yelling at her, claiming that she shouldn’t fight like a man, scratching her eye in the process. Elvis often preached to her and talked down at her as if she were a child, which she was. This toxic behavior mixed with the predatory undertones of his behavior made for a unique character Jacob Elordi was able to play perfectly in such a short amount of time, as the entire movie was filmed within a month. Elvis often reminds Priscilla that the life she lives now is essentially the life she chose to live, reminding her that she needs to be there for him regardless of what is happening, a key detail when he expects her to be understanding of his behavior but yet, does nothing to understand her.
Having watched the movie a few times, I enjoyed it and would probably watch it several more times. Although the ending felt like there was more that could’ve been said in the sense that Priscilla could have been shown living without Elvis, the movie stayed true to the book it’s based on, Elvis & Me, ending the minute she split from Elvis Presley.
Some may choose to argue that Priscilla was boring and left on a sad, open note, but the truth is, Priscilla lived an often sad and lonely life while she was with Elvis. Combined with Sofia Coppola’s style of directing consisting of endings reminiscent of indie movies, the film as a whole felt very complete and hard-hitting. It’s also important to understand that this film is more than just a film, it was the life of not just one of Elvis’ lovers, but the life of Priscilla Presley Beaulieu, leading to me giving it a solid 9/10.