Burning love
The new "guess we have to call it a biopic, what other word fits?" Priscilla, directed by Sofia Coppola from a screenplay she adapted from Priscilla Presley's 1985 memoirs, is exactly what you suspect it is, though exactly what you suspect it is depends on your tastes and history with the director. Do you find Coppola to be a bit of a self-absorbed bore whose movies lean on shallow ambivalence and obscurantism to hide how they're all variations on the exact same "poor little rich girl suffers due to the domineering man in her life" scenario that is, at some level, about the very accomplished filmmaker having extremely complicated feelings about her even more accomplished filmmaker father? This is that. Do you join me in finding Coppola to be one of the only genuinely thrilling contemporary American filmmakers, whose incredibly delicate psychological studies demand the audience to be constantly alert as the film glides all around the protagonist without ever giving us direct access to her inner thoughts, requiring us to build an understanding of her and her world by observing behavior and how the film captures its sets, finding the results to be thoughtful and ambivalent condemnation of hyper-rich consumer culture that could only have been managed so precisely by someone who has lived her whole life in that culture and has no fear of ever being required to leave it? This is that. Do you have no particular opinion on Coppola, and perhaps have only seen Lost in Translation, amongst her films if that? I think this might actually be a really great place to start with her oeuvre.
The simplest way to describe Priscilla, at least in strict auteurist terms, is that it's the story of Marie Antoinette done in the style of Somewhere. It even goes so far as to re-commit the biggest aesthetic error that I'd lay at Marie Antoinette's feet: it is much too uncertain in its application of anachronistic music cues. Go all in! says I, really just lean in to how this movie about Elvis Presley's wife has almost no Elvis Presley music in it (and, at least, it includes no studio recordings of Elvis songs; a brief live piano performance, and two cameos from "Love Me Tender" in the underscore by French pop-rock band Phoenix). Rub our noses in it. But a little dash of bracing anachronism is better than none at all. The story picks up when Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) was all of 14 years old, when her father (Ari Cohen) is stationed at a U.S. base in Germany in 1959. This happens to be exactly when radioactively white-hot rock & roll star Elvis Aaron Presley (Jacob Elordi) is also stationed at the same U.S. base, having been drafted into what surely must be the single most well-known and culturally infamous stint as an enlisted man in military history. During this time, the 24-year-old superstar had one of his lackeys invite Priscilla to a house party, and while her parents instantaneously saw every red flag imaginable waving madly, they caved in and let her attend; this launched a years-long courtship both in Germany and then across the Atlantic Ocean, ultimately ending with Priscilla moving to Memphis, TN, to live officially with Elvis's grandmother (Lynne Griffin), but to spend many, many nights as his guest at Graceland. Eventually, and a couple affairs with movie stars later, the two married, though the marriage lasted for fewer years than the courtship did.
It's easy to imagine what this would have looked like in the hands of a lazy filmmaker just looking to score discourse points with a message movie, but if that's what Coppola had ever intended to make (and based on the rest of her filmography, I can't imagine that she did), she certainly didn't end up there. Priscilla has no apparent desire to portray Elvis as a sexually menacing groomer, because it seems to think that would be giving him too much credit. Insofar as the film considers Elvis as a character at all, and it barely does so, it considers him a useless little peevish manchild, a sexual neurotic whose brain got hyperfucked by vast tsunamis of fame and let him to conclude that he should get to have a virginal porcelain doll for his human menagerie. Early on, as he tries to convince the Beaulieus to let Priscilla come over to play, he utters the phrase "she's mature for her age", which in another context would play as a chilling cliché from a sexual predator (and it sort of plays that way here, mostly because Priscilla's parents obviously hear it that way), but over the course of this movie turns out to mean something more like: "well, she is at any rate more mature than you are, Mr. Presley, and over the next 14 years she will continuously grow more and more mature, while you will remain a stupid little boy until the day you poop yourself to death". But again, that's the movie's perspective on Elvis, which it barely wants to have in the first place; he is almost more of a structuring absence in the film than an actual character, and Coppola's script has not a glimmer of interest in his interior life.
The film is called Priscilla, after all, and Coppola has made a hobby of depicting how women trapped in gilded cages find ways (or don't) of asserting their own personality in a circumstance where their own personality is facing a steep uphill climb. Priscilla sets itself an extra challenge by giving into the stereotype it would seemingly be primed to explode: Priscilla is almost exclusively defined, in the script, in terms of her relationship to Elvis. First, the starstruck fan feeling her first adolescent stirrings of lust in the presence of The Great Pelvis; then, as the adored handmaiden to a chaste benefactor (the film is very insistent on making sure we know that the couple almost never had sex; given what is shown onscreen and how scenes are cut together, it's well within the realm of possibility that movie-Priscilla and movie-Elvis only have sex once, on the night that Lisa Marie was conceived); then, as the frustrated, horny wife of a philandering druggie; finally, as the disgusted witness to the collapse of a sad lump of a man who used to be a god. We never learn anything that Priscilla wants that isn't some facet of her life as Elvis's partner, and the film remains firmly committed to this strategy right until its phenomenal ending MODEST SPOILERS FOR WHERE THIS TRUE STORY ABOUT A STILL-LIVING PERSON DECIDES TO STOP ITS NARRATIVE, where she finally discovers that she can want to be something else, and in so doing frees herself of him. And, very shockingly, frees herself of us: much in the same way that Lost in Translation decided that we didn't have any right to hear what Bill Murray whispered to Scarlett Johansson, so does Priscilla decide that we don't have any right to interfere with Priscilla's emancipation and self-determination by gawking at it. It's perfectly unsatisfying.
This provides a very robust challenge to both Coppola and her incredible star: whatever else we might say about its strengths and weaknesses, Priscilla is obviously a huge deal for the discovery of Spaeny, who has a stupefyingly tough role to carry off. First, the 25-year-old actor (24 at the time of shooting) has to play the character from the ages of 14 to 28, in a context where it is crucial to the basic functioning of the movie that she is completely persuasive at both ends of that spectrum. Second, she has to be able to hold focus while acting against a costar who is sixteen inches taller than she is (40 centimeters, to my European readers), despite the whole purpose of that height differential being to demonstrate how small and marginal Priscilla feels in the presence of the monumental superhuman Elvis - no disrespect to Elordi, who does fine with a role that gives him very little to do, but it seems very evident that his height was his primary qualification for the role. Third, she has to make a character out of all that from the last paragraph, that very conscious decision Coppola has made to define Priscilla by not defining her; it falls mostly on Spaeny assembling a consistent set of reactions, ways of moving through sets, ways of wearing costumes (it's a Sofia Coppola movie, obviously costume design is like fully half of the character-building the movie does) to let us understand what persists of Priscilla, where the interior "her" lies inside all of this. And she has to do this without spoiling the film's overarching strategy, not letting the character assert herself before the story is ready for her to do so, but also without coming across as a pitiable doormat.
Tough, tough stuff, and Spaeny and Coppola make it look so inevitable that I suppose you could overlook it entirely. But it's really incredible, a way of learning who a character is while she's in the process of learning it herself, while still retaining the cool Antonioniesque remove that has been Coppola's overriding priority in virtually all of her movies. All celebrity biopic Oscarbait should be this artfully withholding, demanding so much of us, refusing to say anything when it can be alluded to and gestured at in the blocking and cinematography without any reference to the script. As far as that goes, it's a wonderful-looking film, Coppola's third consecutive collaboration with cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd; there is nothing about it that is "beautiful" in any conventional way, but the argument seems to be that there oughtn't be, and that Le Sourd's stuffy images are designed in no small part to rip the romantic elegance out of the mansion that seems primed to swallow up Spaeny's tiny frame altogether, thanks to the massive gulfs of head space Le Sourd and Coppola hang above her head. The movie's visual style chafes: some messy streaks of light in the exteriors; interiors with exposure focused more on the windows than what the windows are illuminating, so we get a sense of the inside as dull and close while the outside seems promising but indistinct. At the same time, it's not "ugly"; there's something terrible and handsome about how indifferent to Priscilla all of the lighting and compositions seem to be, and it's always nice to see a cinematographer using the parameters of digital photography to create certain distinctive effects, rather than trying to scrub the medium away, in this case mostly by exploiting the way that digital noise can feel less "textural" than film grain, and more like a haze the image is trying to burst through. It's a weird look, but it's the right look for this project and its particular goals: a film about the somewhat dismal hollowness of surfaces, and the difficulty of escaping that when surfaces are the only thing you know. It's unfriendly but very methodical and unified, and it ends up as Coppola's overall best film since the high-water mark of Somewhere.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
The simplest way to describe Priscilla, at least in strict auteurist terms, is that it's the story of Marie Antoinette done in the style of Somewhere. It even goes so far as to re-commit the biggest aesthetic error that I'd lay at Marie Antoinette's feet: it is much too uncertain in its application of anachronistic music cues. Go all in! says I, really just lean in to how this movie about Elvis Presley's wife has almost no Elvis Presley music in it (and, at least, it includes no studio recordings of Elvis songs; a brief live piano performance, and two cameos from "Love Me Tender" in the underscore by French pop-rock band Phoenix). Rub our noses in it. But a little dash of bracing anachronism is better than none at all. The story picks up when Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) was all of 14 years old, when her father (Ari Cohen) is stationed at a U.S. base in Germany in 1959. This happens to be exactly when radioactively white-hot rock & roll star Elvis Aaron Presley (Jacob Elordi) is also stationed at the same U.S. base, having been drafted into what surely must be the single most well-known and culturally infamous stint as an enlisted man in military history. During this time, the 24-year-old superstar had one of his lackeys invite Priscilla to a house party, and while her parents instantaneously saw every red flag imaginable waving madly, they caved in and let her attend; this launched a years-long courtship both in Germany and then across the Atlantic Ocean, ultimately ending with Priscilla moving to Memphis, TN, to live officially with Elvis's grandmother (Lynne Griffin), but to spend many, many nights as his guest at Graceland. Eventually, and a couple affairs with movie stars later, the two married, though the marriage lasted for fewer years than the courtship did.
It's easy to imagine what this would have looked like in the hands of a lazy filmmaker just looking to score discourse points with a message movie, but if that's what Coppola had ever intended to make (and based on the rest of her filmography, I can't imagine that she did), she certainly didn't end up there. Priscilla has no apparent desire to portray Elvis as a sexually menacing groomer, because it seems to think that would be giving him too much credit. Insofar as the film considers Elvis as a character at all, and it barely does so, it considers him a useless little peevish manchild, a sexual neurotic whose brain got hyperfucked by vast tsunamis of fame and let him to conclude that he should get to have a virginal porcelain doll for his human menagerie. Early on, as he tries to convince the Beaulieus to let Priscilla come over to play, he utters the phrase "she's mature for her age", which in another context would play as a chilling cliché from a sexual predator (and it sort of plays that way here, mostly because Priscilla's parents obviously hear it that way), but over the course of this movie turns out to mean something more like: "well, she is at any rate more mature than you are, Mr. Presley, and over the next 14 years she will continuously grow more and more mature, while you will remain a stupid little boy until the day you poop yourself to death". But again, that's the movie's perspective on Elvis, which it barely wants to have in the first place; he is almost more of a structuring absence in the film than an actual character, and Coppola's script has not a glimmer of interest in his interior life.
The film is called Priscilla, after all, and Coppola has made a hobby of depicting how women trapped in gilded cages find ways (or don't) of asserting their own personality in a circumstance where their own personality is facing a steep uphill climb. Priscilla sets itself an extra challenge by giving into the stereotype it would seemingly be primed to explode: Priscilla is almost exclusively defined, in the script, in terms of her relationship to Elvis. First, the starstruck fan feeling her first adolescent stirrings of lust in the presence of The Great Pelvis; then, as the adored handmaiden to a chaste benefactor (the film is very insistent on making sure we know that the couple almost never had sex; given what is shown onscreen and how scenes are cut together, it's well within the realm of possibility that movie-Priscilla and movie-Elvis only have sex once, on the night that Lisa Marie was conceived); then, as the frustrated, horny wife of a philandering druggie; finally, as the disgusted witness to the collapse of a sad lump of a man who used to be a god. We never learn anything that Priscilla wants that isn't some facet of her life as Elvis's partner, and the film remains firmly committed to this strategy right until its phenomenal ending MODEST SPOILERS FOR WHERE THIS TRUE STORY ABOUT A STILL-LIVING PERSON DECIDES TO STOP ITS NARRATIVE, where she finally discovers that she can want to be something else, and in so doing frees herself of him. And, very shockingly, frees herself of us: much in the same way that Lost in Translation decided that we didn't have any right to hear what Bill Murray whispered to Scarlett Johansson, so does Priscilla decide that we don't have any right to interfere with Priscilla's emancipation and self-determination by gawking at it. It's perfectly unsatisfying.
This provides a very robust challenge to both Coppola and her incredible star: whatever else we might say about its strengths and weaknesses, Priscilla is obviously a huge deal for the discovery of Spaeny, who has a stupefyingly tough role to carry off. First, the 25-year-old actor (24 at the time of shooting) has to play the character from the ages of 14 to 28, in a context where it is crucial to the basic functioning of the movie that she is completely persuasive at both ends of that spectrum. Second, she has to be able to hold focus while acting against a costar who is sixteen inches taller than she is (40 centimeters, to my European readers), despite the whole purpose of that height differential being to demonstrate how small and marginal Priscilla feels in the presence of the monumental superhuman Elvis - no disrespect to Elordi, who does fine with a role that gives him very little to do, but it seems very evident that his height was his primary qualification for the role. Third, she has to make a character out of all that from the last paragraph, that very conscious decision Coppola has made to define Priscilla by not defining her; it falls mostly on Spaeny assembling a consistent set of reactions, ways of moving through sets, ways of wearing costumes (it's a Sofia Coppola movie, obviously costume design is like fully half of the character-building the movie does) to let us understand what persists of Priscilla, where the interior "her" lies inside all of this. And she has to do this without spoiling the film's overarching strategy, not letting the character assert herself before the story is ready for her to do so, but also without coming across as a pitiable doormat.
Tough, tough stuff, and Spaeny and Coppola make it look so inevitable that I suppose you could overlook it entirely. But it's really incredible, a way of learning who a character is while she's in the process of learning it herself, while still retaining the cool Antonioniesque remove that has been Coppola's overriding priority in virtually all of her movies. All celebrity biopic Oscarbait should be this artfully withholding, demanding so much of us, refusing to say anything when it can be alluded to and gestured at in the blocking and cinematography without any reference to the script. As far as that goes, it's a wonderful-looking film, Coppola's third consecutive collaboration with cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd; there is nothing about it that is "beautiful" in any conventional way, but the argument seems to be that there oughtn't be, and that Le Sourd's stuffy images are designed in no small part to rip the romantic elegance out of the mansion that seems primed to swallow up Spaeny's tiny frame altogether, thanks to the massive gulfs of head space Le Sourd and Coppola hang above her head. The movie's visual style chafes: some messy streaks of light in the exteriors; interiors with exposure focused more on the windows than what the windows are illuminating, so we get a sense of the inside as dull and close while the outside seems promising but indistinct. At the same time, it's not "ugly"; there's something terrible and handsome about how indifferent to Priscilla all of the lighting and compositions seem to be, and it's always nice to see a cinematographer using the parameters of digital photography to create certain distinctive effects, rather than trying to scrub the medium away, in this case mostly by exploiting the way that digital noise can feel less "textural" than film grain, and more like a haze the image is trying to burst through. It's a weird look, but it's the right look for this project and its particular goals: a film about the somewhat dismal hollowness of surfaces, and the difficulty of escaping that when surfaces are the only thing you know. It's unfriendly but very methodical and unified, and it ends up as Coppola's overall best film since the high-water mark of Somewhere.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
Categories: love stories, oscarbait, sofia coppola, the dread biopic
