05/09/2023 - VENICE 2023: Sofia Coppola takes Marie Antoinette to Graceland, but once again, it’s hard to care

There is just no escaping Elvis these days. Austin Butler still hasn’t shaken off that infamous accent, poor man, but those expecting a similar battle to Capote vs Infamous shouldn’t worry: Baz Luhrmann and Sofia Coppola – who now brings her latest, Priscilla [+see also:
trailer
film profile], to Venice’s main competition – play with different toys. That being said, they both share the Priscilla problem.

In Elvis, she barely made a mark. Here, she remains a quiet character, and her revolt is quiet as well. Even with Jacob Elordi’s part cut to the absolute minimum, it’s still hard to compete with melancholic pill-popping and all-leather outfits.

Priscilla is a perfectly fine biopic. It’s a film about isolation, loneliness and beehive hairdos, hair-sprayed into absolute submission, a bit similar to Pablo Larraín’s Jackie [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] or Coppola’s own Marie Antoinette, with another woman who is completely swallowed up by her luxurious surroundings and reduced to waiting. But it’s just too damned polite.

The only truly interesting part comes from the fact that Coppola – who in the past few years has often had to comment on the age difference between Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray in her breakout Lost in Translation – now really shows how young Priscilla Beaulieu was when they first met. It’s uncomfortable, and it’s weird. It actually feels like grooming.  

To be perfectly clear: Presley, who is one of the film’s executive producers, still referred to Elvis as “the love of her life” during her stay in Venice, and no one here is baying for blood. But this way, Coppola’s film morphs into a tale of a man creating his perfect woman, teaching her to always put him first, and even dyeing her hair. He can do it precisely because of her age. At the beginning, she is “just a child”, a teen with that bouncy American ponytail coming from a room full of trinkets and romantic ideas, stuck in Germany where “Elvis the soldier” is suddenly transferred. And then, to the shock of her parents (Ari Cohen and Succession’s Dagmara Domińczyk, once again playing someone who is constantly preoccupied), she is chosen. When you are chosen, you don’t complain.

It makes for an intriguing premise, which is surprisingly dark, but soon, Priscilla becomes a familiar story of one woman’s unlikely liberation, and Cailee Spaeny can’t really capture that change. She tries, going from a sweet kid shipped off to a stranger, to a woman who doesn’t just want a room of her own – she wants the whole life. Coppola isn’t interested in Elvis; she barely shows him on stage. She is interested in a childish man and a woman who has to grow up. But it’s hard to care about either of them.

Priscilla was produced by Fremantle’s The Apartment Pictures (Italy) and American Zoetrope (USA). The Match Factory handles its international sales, with MUBI also on board.