There are few directors as gifted as Sofia Coppola when it comes to capturing that very specific view of a world glimpsed through the bars of a gilded cage. First with the five-star hotel ennui of Lost in Translation (2003), then the ribbon-bedecked prison of privilege in Marie Antoinette (2006), and now the dark side of a fairytale in Priscilla. Coppola evokes the aching loneliness and isolation experienced by women who simultaneously have everything and nothing.
In this case the woman is a girl. Priscilla Beaulieu – a superb Cailee Spaeny, wholly convincing both as the child and adult Priscilla – is just 14 when she first meets rock’n’roll superstar Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi) at a party at his home near a US army base in West Germany. She is, unsurprisingly, smitten. And who can blame her? Elordi taps into an intriguing, quixotic cruelty beneath the glittering charisma; his Elvis is a darker, more dangerously complicated creature than Austin Butler’s sunnier version in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. Normal life, and the daily grind of school, lose all meaning once Priscilla has experienced the solar flare of Elvis’s attention. Everything, from the Beaulieu family’s utilitarian, army-issue home to the quality of light in the rooms that suffocate her, seems duller and darker when Elvis is not around.
