Priscilla, Sofia Coppola’s telling of the courtship of the 14-year-old Priscilla Presley née Beaulieu by the 24-year-old Elvis, will make uncomfortable viewing for fans of The King. It shows him in a far from flattering light, as an insecure narcissist fixated on a teenage girl and unwilling to allow his young wife any independence. The film, endorsed by Presley herself and adapted from her book Elvis and Me (which she co-wrote with Sandra Harmon), is a downbeat and dour affair, with little of the exuberance of Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis last year.
“We are leading separate lives,” Priscilla (Mare of Easttown’s Cailee Spaeny) tells Elvis (Euphoria’s Jacob Elordi) toward the end of the film. Truthfully, though, she always seemed to exist on the periphery of his world – ever since they first met while she was enrolled in a German high school, with Elvis visiting as part of his stint in the US army. When Priscilla is first asked over to Elvis’s house, piercing her life of restlessness and boredom in the process, she leaps at the chance of some excitement. Her father, a military officer, is at first extremely reluctant to allow her to hang out with Elvis and his friends. But once he is reassured that his daughter will be strictly chaperoned, he relents.
