Elvis & Priscilla: When the Prince Tried to Suffocate His Princess

Simone Meier

Everything is always so boring. No, not in real life, but with the wives of director Sofia Coppola. Scarlett Johansson is bored in transparent underwear in “Lost in Translation”. Marie Antoinette has no choice but to become the queen of the party in boring Versailles. In “Somewhere”, Elle Fanning is bored out of her mind at the world’s favorite hotel for all the drug-addicted rich kids, the Chateau Marmont. There is a curse on being privileged, Coppola keeps saying, who should know this.

And that’s why Priscilla (the beautiful Cailee Spaeny) is bored now. First she is bored in Germany, then in Graceland. How is that possible? For the most boring reason in the world! Because she’s waiting for a man! For days, weeks, years. Because that is the story of Elvis (Jacob Elordi) and Priscilla Presley, as told to us by Sofia Coppola, with the active help of the real Priscilla.

So that we understand each other well: even though Coppola once again uses her only fetish theme here, “Priscilla” is certainly not a boring film, on the contrary! It is the perfect flip side to Baz Luhrmann’s lush musical epic ‘Elvis’, in which Priscilla hardly played the role of cheerful side table.

Now we get her side of the 14 years together with Elvis. They begin when Priscilla is 14 and Elvis is 24. When her stepfather and Elvis are both stationed at a German military base. Elvis is already a world star, Priscilla is a child, an innocent lamb in pink angora fluff, “you’re a baby,” he says, “thank you,” she says. You cannot imagine a shyer creature than the little American girl; the soldier Elvis sees her as an innocent, intact piece of home, and she sees him as her idol and savior.

It is a completely unlikely love story and yet a true love story: he has to return to America, she stays in Germany, dreams of him and reads in the magazines which star he would have an affair with again. At the age of 17 she is allowed to visit him, her suitcase is full of pink, his bedroom is all black and gold, he takes a sleeping pill at night and amphetamines for breakfast, that’s how it really was, and he doesn’t want sex.

At 18, she moves in with him, drags herself to an all-girls Catholic school during her pill-induced woke phase, and lets Elvis fans stare at her through the gates of Graceland. She has no friends, and here we are in the middle of the Coppola trauma of the poor, little, rich girl, who only has a little white poodle for a playmate.

Seven years after their first kiss, Elvis proposes to her. It will be a wedding in Las Vegas. The real Priscilla insists that she entered the marriage as a virgin and became pregnant on her wedding night. Elvis biographers doubt this. Coppola sticks to Priscilla’s version because it’s the only way she can ever tell her favorite story, that of a beautiful vacuum. tell it again in all its beauty. The story of a woman who feels like a package that wants to finally be unpacked.

For Coppola, Elvis and Priscilla are more playmates than lovers. His behavior in his spare time and in the bedroom is extremely immature, almost eternally childish. He likes to do nonsense with a council of five obnoxious friends, and even when he goes clothes shopping with Priscilla, they are there.

In general, his motto is shopping instead of fucking, he treats Priscilla to everything, even revolvers that match the color of her costumes (Chanel helped, who else) and a convertible, but he always saves himself. For “the many women out there” who want a piece of his “gift,” as he says. Priscilla is his puppet, he chooses her make-up, hair and clothing color, then he goes away, makes his films, does his concerts, lives his life as a sex idol, she stays behind. Without his music, but with his initials on every carpet.

For a film set in the music world, ‘Priscilla’ is a surprisingly quiet, intimate film. And if there is music, it is not by Elvis, but by Brenda Lee, the Ramones or Dolly Parton. Elvis without his music – that’s the Emperor without his clothes. Sometimes sweet, sometimes incredibly sweet, sometimes funny (the bed scene under LSD!), often insecure and all too often a selfish bastard who becomes increasingly prone to violence.

Coppola’s take on Elvis and Priscilla is laced with nostalgia, in terms of decor and color choice it is everything Lana Del Rey ever dreamed of. Narratively, the direction fluctuates between painfully precise and freely mimicked, but above all, the direction is absolutely and deeply emotionally biased. Never have you been so relieved that a woman finally manages to wear brown (one of Elvis’s forbidden colors) as at the end of ‘Priscilla’.

Elvis is dead, Priscilla left him before her thirtieth birthday, which was her salvation. From a fairy tale in which a rotting prince tries to suffocate the princess under a mountain of beautiful dresses and false eyelashes.

‘Priscilla’ will be in cinemas from December 26.