Love me tender, love me sweet, never let me go…
Just a year after Baz Luhrman’s ‘Elvis’ (starring Austin Butler) we get a whole different take to this story that throws the narrative Luhrman created upside down.
Sofia Coppola’s newest film ‘Priscilla’ premiered at the Venice Film Festival last night and received a flood of positive reviews. I loved it and I hope you stick with me to tell you why.
Now, Coppola is known to create incredible stories about women. Freeing privileged women from grips. Coppola is also excellent in creating intimacy and capturing human emotions in slow films very well. She’s been at the festival before in 2003 for her screening of ‘Lost In Translation’.
With ‘Priscilla’ she dared to write a screenplay that wasn’t for Elvis fans, rightfully so. It questions the relationship 14-year-old Priscilla had with the then already established Rock n’ Roll icon Elvis Presley.
The film looked like what being in love as a teen felt like. All colored in Cotton Candy Colors.
We meet the great Elvis Presley out of Priscillas POV in a military base camp in West Germany. She’s staying with her parents. We see her do homework at a diner until she gets interrupted by older men who approach her and ask her if she wants to join a party. They say they’re friends with Elvis. She must’ve heard of Elvis, right? We see a young girl, introduced to a famous figure she’s in awe of.
Elvis Presley here is played by Jacob Elordi. Some of you might be familiar with his breakout role as Nate Jacobs in Euphoria.
Cailee Spaeny plays young Priscilla. Something that will immediately get the spectators attention is the immense height difference the characters have. Considering that they had a 10-year age gap when he met teenage Priscilla. The image of seeing a tall Jacob Elordi as Presley in front of a much smaller Spaeny in the role of Priscilla, is something that tells a lot without saying it out loud. Especially given that in the scene right before she met him, we see her choose outfits with her mother.
Both Actors did a really good job. Spaeny captures the silent pain Priscilla felt in her relationship so well: nodding, accepting, hoping it might change, while also loving the man she fell in love with back in Germany. Elordi plays the charming but troubled Elvis so well, making the audience understand his actions, but never pity him.
Coppola does not back away to picture Elvis as a turbulent, abusive, manipulative, and insecure man. At the same time, she manages to capture the love he tries to give, and the love Priscilla is feeling in all of this. The relationship is wrong in so many ways, yet the audience gets told why she stayed for so long. It has been a while since I saw an audience gasp together when seeing a man who was adored by so many shed in a different light: telling Priscilla how to wear her hair, how to do her makeup, criticizing her dresses or having outbursts of anger when she does not agree with him.
Priscilla is a story that is important to tell and a film that is important to see, especially to those who’ve seen the romanticized view on Elvis by Baz Luhrman a year before. Maybe this could be a wake-up call for those who refused to listen to Priscillas POV for so long…
-Rue