Feminist auteure Sofia Coppola's biopic of Priscilla Presley is the story of a young woman's awakening after living a few years in the shadow of a superstar
When they met for the first time in 1959, she was all of 14, and still in school. He was 24 and already a world-famous superstar, a Rock ‘n’ Roll legend. It would take a good eight years for them to tie the knot, even though they spent a considerable part of this period together: okay, make that together yet apart. Six years after they exchanged the wedding vows, and had a daughter, they would part ways, with Priscilla having realised that she had been trapped; her freedom stifled, her will smothered, her individuality subsumed. She had understood that they were leading separate lives. She had been lonely, terribly lonely, in the dysfunctional relationship that put her at a disadvantage by its skewed power dynamic from the very beginning.
Feminist auteure Sofia Coppola has explored the psychic fractures and abjection of femininity and femaleness in the gilded worlds in The Virgin Suicides (1999), Lost in Translation (2003) and Marie Antoinette (2006). In her latest, Priscilla, based on Priscilla Presley’s memoir, Elvis and Me (1985), she tells a similar story of the female experience in the patriarchal world. It is the story of courtship and a brief marriage between a private, naïve — ingénue, if you will — doe-eyed Southerner Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny) and her mass-entertainer spouse Elvis (Jacob Elordi), who has women swooning over him wherever he goes. It follows the two over a course of 13 years, from the time they first meet to the eventual dissolution of their marriage when Priscilla is just 27. We see what it is like for that vulnerable young girl to come of age in the shadow of a larger-than-life star with slicked-back pompadours and long sideburns, who literally has Priscilla eating out of his hands.
Living a dream
The film opens with Priscilla, the Cinderella of her fairytale, stepping on a luxurious carpet and prepping her makeup; her movement is set to Alice Coltrane’s Going Home, which transitions into the punk rock band The Ramones’ version of Baby, I Love You, the 1963 single by The Ronettes. When they meet for the first time, Elvis has been drafted into military service, and is stationed at Bad Nauheim in West Germany. Although the film, focused as it’s on its female protagonist, shows none of it, it’s the time when Elvis is at the pinnacle of his fame; his body of work at this point includes 17 million-selling singles, and four films starring him — Love Me Tender (1956), Loving You (1957), Jailhouse Rock (1957) and King Creole (1958) — that have become box-office hits.
Having lost his mother, Gladys, the love of his life, to heart failure at the age of 42 a year before, not only does Elvis feel a bit lonely and adrift, he is also unsure of how he would be received by his fans when he returns to the States. He dreaded returning to Graceland, his mansion in Memphis, without his mother there, writes Priscilla in her memoir: “It had been his gift to her, a private estate that he’d purchased for $100,000 a year before she died. Elvis had assured her that he would return in 18 months, even begged her to join him, but Gladys’s fear of losing her only son drove her to her grave.”
Priscilla Ann Wagner, on the other hand, is in Wiesbaden — also in West Germany — where her stepfather, Capt. Paul Beaulieu (Ari Cohen), who is in the Air Force, has been transferred to. Priscilla is introduced to Elvis by another soldier, Currie Grant (Luke Humphrey), and she is invited to a party at the former’s house because the matinee-music idol yearns to talk to people from ‘back home’. When she arrives there, she looks flustered, awkward, and out of place in the melee of adults Elvis is surrounded by. When she tells him she is still in ninth grade, he laughs. “You’re just a baby,” he says. “Thanks,” she says, somewhat curtly, giving Elvis a taste of her spunk and sassiness. After going back to the US, Elvis gets too busy and even as a love-struck Priscilla eagerly awaits to hear from him, days pass with no word from him. Till he decides to reconnect one fine morning, inviting her over to his house in the US. The weeks, months and years that follow, see the two coming close to each other, only to eventually drift apart. The differences in their circumstances are so stark their unlikely alliance seems doomed even before its start.
The end of the dream
As a country boy raised with strict Southern Christian morals, Elvis has traditional notion of relationships, and a demure Priscilla perfectly fits his image of an ideal woman. When she moves to Graceland permanently, after her parents get an assurance of marriage from Elvis, it slowly becomes apparent how he wants her to shape her opinions and preferences in his mould. His infractions are transgressions are too many, and too frequent. If he doesn’t like what she thinks of a song, he hurls a chair at her that misses her head by a whisker. If she expresses her desire to take up a job, tired of the monotony of being stuck inside the four walls, with Elvis often away on tours and shoots, he tells her: “It's either me or a career, Baby. Because when I call you, I need you to be there.” When he takes her shopping — he does so along with his entourage — Elvis dictates what dress she should buy, and even its colour.
To top it all, he has many affairs. Though he abstains from consummating their relationship before marriage, even though Priscilla desperately wants him to, he goes around having flings with other women (his escapades, including the famous one with Nancy Sinatra, reach Priscilla through headlines which she finds herself staring at every once in a while) whenever he is away from her. For Priscilla, life in the high lane seems to be fun — she experiments with LCD at his behest, the two careen through Los Angeles and Las Vegas, gambling and generally living it up — there is something that is eating away at her. Through a sequence of events in rapid succession, Coppola shows us the important milestones in their married life — from locking themselves up in their bedroom for days and clicking each other’s photos in various stages of clothing, and nakedness, to having a daughter, Lisa Marie.
Priscilla, who matures into a discerning woman, is able to see the pointlessness of being caught in a marriage in which she is reduced to being a plaything of sorts. Coppola’s success lies in her ability to infuse the film with a mood and tone that resonate with the weight of Priscilla’s loss — of agency, of choice — and her palpable loneliness. Though it feels rushed at times, there is no frill or frippery. We are kept oblivious to what goes on in Priscilla's mind, but we feel her, silently commiserate with her. And, therefore, when she drives away from Elvis’s estate (“Am I losing you to another man?” asks the superstar, when she tells him she is leaving the marriage, unable to come to terms with her assertion) — as Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You plays as the background score — we are happy for her. She is, at last, free. To live on her own terms.
