‘Priscilla’ review: Dir. Sofia Coppola (2024)

Sofia Coppola has made a career out of telling stories about women cast adrift. From The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation to Marie Antoinette and Somewhere the director has has crafted some brilliant, occasionally tragic tales. A common thread through much of her work is her analysis of fame. The sisters in The Virgin Suicides are ‘celebrities’ of the town, Lost in Translation’s Charlotte gets to know a washed-up celebrity, Somewhere follows the daughter of a star, and Marie Antoinette is obviously about a famous monarch. Even The Bling Ring was about the cult of celebrity. It comes as no surprise then that her latest film, Priscilla, is once more looking at life through the lens of fame. 

This time around Coppola is exploring the life of someone in a relationship with a star, namely Elvis Presley. Priscilla chronicles the first meeting of Elvis (Jacob Elordi) and Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny) all the way through to Priscilla serving Elvis with divorce papers. There is a lot of story to cover and so Coppola chooses to focus on the earlier years of the couple’s union. The meet cute first encounter seen in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is replaced with a more controversial and repellent scenario. Opening in West Germany in the late fifties, a fourteen-year-old Priscilla is head-hunted by one of Elvis’ army friends at the local diner. The soldier is insistent that she attend a party at Elvis’ house, and somehow, despite Elvis being a twenty-four year old man and the party being for adults, doesn’t deter her parents from agreeing to let her go.  

The ten year age gap has been glossed over in other movies, and although not dwelled on in Priscilla ,it is far more prominent than it has been before. This move presents Elvis in a very different light. As their relationship progresses, his coercive control over his younger partner is evident. He toys with her emotions, playing on her adoration to help inflate his own insecure ego. This won’t be a portrayal that everyone will enjoy, but it is fascinating to watch. It is wild that Elvis paid for Priscilla to relocate from West Germany to Graceland so that she could finish high-school in America. That her parents agreed is, again, baffling. 

Once at Graceland, Priscilla ventures into some traditional Sofia Coppola territory. Montages of the young woman roaming alone around the grand grounds of Graceland echo much of Coppola’s former work. Although Elvis wanted Priscilla at Graceland, he himself was hardly there. Priscilla lived there with Elvis’ father and was under strict rules of isolation. Her only role was to be at the end of a phone whenever the rock and roll star required it. Her existence is a harsh one and Coppola taps into the character’s isolation and loneliness beautifully. 

As Priscilla, Cailee Spaeny is sublime. She captures all of Priscilla’s conflictions wonderfully. Priscilla is clearly head over heels for Elvis, but she is also uncomfortable about how she is treated. Sadly, given her young years, and the fact that Elvis has wrenched her from the security and support of her family, she is left between a rock and a hard place. It took Priscilla years to muster the strength and confidence to leave Presley, which is a tale that many will identify with. Jacob Elordi is also fantastic as Elvis. His portrayal is very different to that of Austin Butler, and after his turn in Saltburn, has the part of a rich man playing with people like toys down to a fine art. 

With so much focus on the time from their meeting until their eventual marriage, the rest of the couple’s time together is truncated. Once Priscilla has a ring on her finger, events race forward. She is pregnant and then in a flash has had the baby; the next moment, Lisa-Marie is a toddler. After the slow and steady pace, it is a little hard to keep up with, but follows a similar narrative structure to that in Marie Antoinette. It is a slight negative, but more because the story Coppola is telling has been so fascinating and refreshing that the audience doesn’t want to be cheated out of any of it. Coppola could have easily added another hour to the run-time to explore this, and we are in an era of the three-hour movie being popular again. Her decision to keep Priscilla below two hours though is a wise move. As frustrating as it is to gloss over what must have been some tumultuous years, that Priscilla doesn’t overstay its welcome is appreciated. 

From a technical construction point of view Priscilla is as elegant as any of Coppola’s other projects. The costumes are stunning, the hair and make-up perfectly on point. The production design lands somewhere between Marie Antoinette and The Virgin Suicides and the soundtrack is once more superb. Given the harsh portrayal of Elvis, the Presley estate vetoed the use of his music. Coppola has found plenty of ways to circumvent this ruling however, and as with Marie Antoinette, she instils an air of modernity into proceedings. 

With Priscilla, Sofia Coppola does not reinvent the wheel in terms of her own filmography. The themes are familiar, as is Priscilla’s construction. However, her darker look at the King of rock and roll stops Priscilla from feeling akin to Coppola by numbers. Led by the fantastic performance of Cailee Spaeny and the ice-cold delivery of Jacob Elordi, Priscilla is a beautiful depiction of a teenage dream turned bitter nightmare. 

Priscilla is in UK cinemas now.