SOPHIA COPPOLA IS a director whose style (and success) lies to a large extent in her intensely visual literacy. She’s a goddess of semiotics…each image laden with symbolism and meaning. In Priscilla, her Elvis (Jacob Elordi) for instance is a giant of a man, towering like a Colossus over the petit, doll-like stature of his child paramour, Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny, who looks perfect for the part as the adult child).
It’s an image that immediately communicates -without the need for words – the absolute inequality of their relationship. She the child, he the adult; except that he really isn’t the adult. He’s just the image of one. Adults are few and far between in the movie…Priscilla’s stern parents are the only grown-ups in this infantalised world. For Elvis is as much a child as she is, happy frolicking with his gang of acolytes and soaking up the adoration of his besotted fans. The big difference is that she’s the child with nothing; he’s the child with power, money and fame.
Their relationship is bizarrely asexual, like pre-puberty children, romping in the bed. His seduction of her – so effortless, this fan in awe of her teen matinee idol – is not about sexual conquest. It’s about his need to sculpt an idealised version of his image of an abstract idea of ‘the perfect woman’. Image is all: he arranges her face to suit this idealisation, chooses her clothes, establishes clearly the parameters of their relationship. She – this unreal, created Priscilla – is the chaste stay-at-home virgin, possessed of everything he thinks a girl could possible desire, except desire itself: big house, small dog, shiny new car, couture that makes her small sixteen year-old frame look like a fifty year-old’s. She’s both his child and his mother…neither sexually desirable.
The clothes, the environment of the home, the trappings, the hairstyles are all image perfect. These are the semiotics of entrapment. And beneath these symbols of his fantasies, his child-like simulacrum of love and marriage lies the (even) darker reality of drugs, deception and the Deus ex machina of the Colonel calling the shots.
It’s very clever. And emotionally sterile.
On the one hand, Coppola has brilliantly laid out her case of Priscilla: the girl imprisoned in her gilded cage. We know that at some stage the girl in the grown-up clothes must age into the clothes themselves. But the movie doesn’t carry us emotionally there. For Priscilla’s internal emotional life, there’s an emptiness, a vacuum. We know she’s depressed and repressed because we’re shown her sad and then happy and then depressed etc. But the emotional arc that the story needs; that felt life that must pull her into her into our zone of empathy is absent. Coppola seems to have depended to such an extent on music and imagery that the whole enterprise, lacking an actor who can convey inner feeling, seems to live only on the surface. The result is a short movie (by these days’ standards) that feels longer than it is.
She should have taken one look at the dull script and then ordered her assistant to…return to sender. Oops she wrote it too.
PRISCILLA. Writer (from the book by Priscilla Presley) and director: Sophia Coppola. With: Cailee Spaeny (Mare of Easttown), Jacob Elordi (Saltburn). Cinematographer: Philippe Le Sourd. Costume Designer: Stacey Battat (Still Alice). Composer: Phoenix
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