Priscilla: Cailee Spaeny’s stunning performance lights up the screen despite Sofia Coppola’s single-note screenplay

What comes to mind when you think of Elvis Presley? Is it Jailhouse Rock with his signature leg-shaking? Or the melancholic romance of Are You Lonesome Tonight with that curling lip?

Writer-director Sofia Coppola’s latest film, Priscilla, will change whatever image of Elvis Presley you have. If not forever, then at least for a while those magical musical moments will recede to the background, and upfront will be a tall, very talented, but strange man who courted, groomed, married, and then controlled the life of a girl who was 10 years younger to him.

The film, based on Priscilla’s autobiography, Elvis and Me, takes a peek into the mind, behavior, and sex life of the man who changed music forever, to understand how he changed Priscilla’s life as well, first by deconstructing her identity and then constructing the woman he wanted her to be.

Priscilla, starring American actress Cailee Spaeny as the doe-eyed young girl, is at the center of the film, but she is seen always and only in relation to Elvis.

Just as it was in real life, so it is in Coppola’s film—there is no Priscilla without Elvis. That’s not a tragedy explained; that’s a tragedy repeated.

Coppola’s 113-minute film begins with dissected shots of Priscilla, the chosen one. We see long, fake eyelashes on Priscilla’s tiny, bare feet as she walks daintily on a plush carpet. The story she tells us, as he paints her toes red, begins with a flashback to 1959 in West Germany, where Priscilla Beaulieu, then 14 years old and studying in the ninth grade, lived with her mother Ann and stepfather Paul Beaulieu, a US Air Force officer.

Elvis was 24 at the time, already a huge rock star, and serving at the US Army base in Germany for two years.

The two met at a party in his house, and immediately he began courting her, gently at first, then with long absences broken by brief but romantic, longing phone calls. When he finally has her where he wants her, very clear terms of engagement follow.

In Germany, Elvis would get Priscilla over to his house often. To put her anxious parents at ease, sometimes he would go to pick her up himself; at other times, he would send a trusted chaperone and use the presence of his grandmother, Minnie Mae, as a cover.

A rock star who drew large, screaming crowds of fans wherever he went made Priscilla dizzy with all the attention. Her parents were floored too and agreed to a strange arrangement: After Elvis moved back to the US, he persuades her parents to let her live with him. Priscilla drops out of school, leaves her home and moves into Graceland, Elvis’ estate in Memphis.

Priscilla and Elvis’ seven-and-a-half-year courtship lasted longer than their marriage, though red flags lined their journey from the very first date to their separation.

The film shows that from the day they met, Elvis made the relationship all about his needs, his career, his feelings, and his grief—his mother had passed away recently—casting Priscilla in the role of his eager caretaker, who must tread lightly, always aim to please, and never to make things, or his mood, any worse by asserting herself or asking too many questions.

He tells her, “Baby, it’s either me or a career”, issues instructions on what she must and must not wear—no prints, ever—and tells her to color her hair black and to wear more eye makeup. He also hands her pills—to sleep and to stay up—and buys her guns, and in one brief scene, there’s a hint of Elvis’ foot fetish that she doesn’t seem to relish.

The quid pro quo of providing for her was that she would surrender control over every aspect of her life to him, remain devoted, and always be available at the other end of the phone, even when he was on tour or shooting a film in Hollywood.

During these long absences, Priscilla would often feel her own absence from his life while flipping through magazines and tabloids that splashed photos of Elvis and the many actresses he was allegedly having affairs with.

According to gossip columns, Elvis had affairs with several women, including actresses Anita Wood, 17-year-old Tuesday Weld, Cybill Shepherd, Connie Stevens, his Viva Las Vegas co-star Ann-Margret Olsson, Peggy Lipton, Linda Thompson, and Ginger Alden.

He also had affairs with Juliet Prowse, Frank Sinatra’s long-time girlfriend, and Rita Moreno, who was dating Marlon Brando at the time and reportedly hooked up with Elvis because Brando had cheated on her.

Elvis either dismissed Priscilla’s questions about his affairs as baseless gossip or his soul was already too tortured to deal with her questions.

Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, made with the approval of Priscilla Presley, is a big, glamorous Hollywood film that seduces us with its two beautiful lead actors and their tragic love story.

The film is often in an intimate, tight close-up with Cailee Spaeny’s Priscilla, its adoring gaze fixed on her as she is escorted from one date to another, waits for Elvis’ phone calls, falls in love with him, enjoys all the attention, becomes the child bride, and slowly realizes the price she has to pay for being with him.

There are loud echoes of Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House, in this story of Elvis and Priscilla. And cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd’s gaze, who can’t stop admiring her dewy, fragile beauty, is often the gaze of Elvis, the man who embodied her with his fetishes and complexes. 

But every once in a while, we get a glimpse of Elvis through Priscilla’s eyes.

Played with an equal measure of endearing diffidence and brazen narcissism by Jacob Elordi, we first meet Elvis as a charming young man, a rockstar who creates a frenzy wherever he goes but is besotted with a 9th grader. Over the course of the film, we see this all-American hero, this king of rock’n’roll, loved and surrounded by friends and family at all times, transform into a pill-popping, obese man who is falling apart. Emotionally and spiritually adrift, he has time to only cursorily play husband to Priscilla and father to his daughter, Lisa Ann.

Cailee Spaeny’s performance as Priscilla from the age of 14 to almost 27 is like the story of a woman told in pretty portraits, each one conveying an emotion with a bouffant and dress to match.

Spaeny’s Priscilla begins as a short, petite young girl who wears her hair in a ponytail. But en route to becoming Mrs Presley, she begins to fill the screen with her fashionable ensembles and feelings—of being trapped by a man she loved, having no life, no home, and no identity of her own.

Spaeny’s performance is delicate, elegant, and moving, but it is disinfected of all ugliness. It is sure to get her an Oscar nomination, but it’s not likely to get her an Oscar. 

The Academy likes to see blemishes, flaws, and cracks, and, in women especially, mascara should run down cheeks at least once.

In Coppola’s film, we get to admire a gorgeous girl as she grows up into a stunning, fetishized doll with long lashes and a tiny waist. We feel sad for her. We understand her frustrations, constraints, inability to move out of Elvis’ house, and shadow. But when she does move out, we don’t get to be with her at that moment. There is no complication or introspection about her own choices.

Last year, Baz Luhrmann’s film Elvis, starring Austin Butler, focused on Elvis and his complicated relationship with his manager, the Colonel. He begins on stage in a bright pink-and-black suit, singing and shaking, but soon after there are struggles—with himself, his music, drug addiction, and finances—that leave the greatest-selling solo artist ever to end his career with a performance that is stunning and heartbreaking. An obese and breathless Elvis sits at the piano to sing Unchained Melody.

In Coppola’s film, Spaeny’s Priscilla is always dignified, poised, and a little distant, probably because that’s how the autobiography portrays her. She arrives and exits the film blemish-free and emotionally unscathed. That made the film feel a little dishonest and more like a fairy tale.

Lisa Marie, Elvis and Priscilla’s daughter, who died in January this year, had disapproved of the film’s script, calling it Coppola’s “vengeful and contemptuous perspective” of her father.

Coppola’s film shows how Elvis would keep Priscilla away from Hollywood, especially when he was having an affair, but it doesn’t show Priscilla’s first extra-marital affair, though she has written about it.   

This deliberate omission doesn’t take away from the fact that Elvis Presley was a complex, disturbed man, a misogynist who did not want to have any physical relationship with Priscilla after she had given birth. But it did make me wonder how much truth the film has ignored in its attempt to present Priscilla only as a victim of Presley and never of her choices.

Priscilla was the closing film at the recently held Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (Mami) Film Festival. It is scheduled to be released in theatres in December 2023.