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Pop stars duet, but movies make odd couples. In 2022, Elvis Presley returned to the building with Baz Luhrmann’s fevered biopic Elvis. In that telling, the subject’s real partner was svengali manager “Colonel” Tom Parker, loudly played by Tom Hanks. The star’s wife Priscilla was less significant; a wafting support act. Now though, we have Priscilla, Sofia Coppola’s evocative study of the woman behind the man in black leather: a counterargument in pink angora.
That Priscilla would make us think of Elvis is only natural. Life in that quiffed shadow is the heart of the story. But the films sing very different tunes. For Luhrmann, something went primally awry when Presley joined the US military. That’s where Priscilla comes in. It is 1959, and Elvis’s fame is as vast as army brat Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) is physically tiny: 14 and stranded in the strange enclave America of a US military base in West Germany. Stationed nearby is the king, in exile.
The first meeting is fittingly surreal: Elvis hosting a polite soirée in suburban Bad Nauheim. For Priscilla, it is a fairytale. Through contemporary eyes, it also stirs unease. The star, then 24, invites the awestruck teenager to his bedroom. But behind closed doors, Presley simply pours his heart out, still grieving his mother’s death.
Let the inner contradictions roll. Jacob Elordi’s Elvis is hound-dog and little boy lost; Spaeny’s Priscilla naive, but indubitably bright. And the modern lens the film puts on the past is subtle. Coppola lets us ask ourselves where this life might have led without her wedding the 20th century’s biggest cultural icon.
Our heroine brings out the best in the director, for whom the project is very on-brand. Her signature movie, Lost in Translation, was another tale of an uncertain wife in a gilded cage. Two decades on, Priscilla has a sharper edge, but Coppola still prefers suggestion to editorial. Much is hidden in plain sight.
Take that issue of age. Rather than being swept under a tigerskin rug, characters raise it repeatedly. Elvis himself insists the budding relationship stay chaste, even after Priscilla, now 17, moves back to America and into Graceland. What follows is all white poodles and luxe trips to Vegas; the mood so woozy and rhapsodic we might almost miss that, while pointedly not sleeping with Priscilla, Elvis is still firmly putting proprietary dibs on her.
The rest is a love story, truly — and a lopsided power game. “Promise me you’ll stay the way you are,” Elvis implores in Bad Nauheim. Priscilla would if she could. Later, during their secret, sexless pseudo-engagement, he tells his frustrated girlfriend they can do “other things”. That often means critiquing her fashion sense. One more exercise in control, yes, but especially loaded. In the nearest thing the film has to a sex scene, the pair dress up and take racy Polaroids: the look of sex in place of sex itself.
If the movie is about becoming a plus-one, it is also about the drug of performance. For Priscilla, there is the strange, heavily scripted role of wife to Elvis. For her husband, a life that makes sense only in front of screaming crowds.
And the key note is melancholy: a coming-of-age through a marriage whose final lesson is knowing when to leave it. Elvis and Priscilla both head in the same sad direction. But one film finds something there beyond tragedy alone: a flight from the flashbulbs, and a story that continues without needing us to see it.
★★★★☆
In UK cinemas from January 5
