Dolly Parton tells a story about how, after his breakup with Priscilla, Elvis wanted to record a version of her legendary song I Will Always Love You, but the deal had to be that he would own the song in return. Being the smart business woman she is, she refused and his version never saw the light of day. In light of this, the use of the song at the end of Priscilla is a genius move, capturing the emotion the film needs while also, perhaps, giving the story of these two star crossed lovers a heart wrenching send off referencing this real life moment for a film that had no rights to any of his actual music.
Priscilla is the story of a girl who becomes a young woman all in the control of a very powerful man. It is a difficult story to tell (despite my love for Luhrmann's Elvis film I've always maintained he bungles the handling of this aspect of the singer's life) even though the film's source is the memoire of the title young woman herself. Trying to explore this specific relationship without oversimplifying the complications and problematic nature of it is a real challenge that Coppola mostly manages to handle quite deftly. She doesn't vilify Elvis despite painting a portrait of him that is less than admirable.
In many of her films, the subject of women living under the male gaze is explored and this story fits that pattern well. We see, quite methodically laid out, how Priscilla was groomed as a child into becoming the woman Elvis thought he needed. The film doesn't show him as a predator in the way we might expect, in fact his sexual boundaries are portrayed as being rather chaste with Priscilla, but in other ways; being controlling, demanding limits on what she can and cannot do, making choices for her. Her infatuation with him is obvious but so is the inappropriateness of their romance and how it isn't necessarily good for either of them.
But where Priscilla falls down in how it fails to give us any reason to feel bittersweet about their break up. The film builds over time to Priscilla making the decision to leave and then driving off to Dolly's tearful singing. But its hard not to feel anything but relief. There is little conflict in our response. She needed to be out of there and a long time sooner. The film also sort of fumbles the development of her own agency. The premise here is that she is too young to have been able to have any real say in much of the decisions made for her and that the way she was handled continued to infantilize her to a certain degree. By the end the film needs us to see how she grew up enough to know what she needed to do but the film gives us little to make us see this. There is an awkwardly inserted scene of her taking a self-defence class that feels tacked on and she starts wearing her hair naturally. But very little in the film shows her coming into her own so that the final scene can carry the weight it needs to. Dolly does more of that work.
Still the film tells a fascinating story and I appreciated that it didn't try to just make it all feel overly simple. It just needed to give us more in its third act to really give us Priscilla's story.
Priscilla
Starring: Cailee Spaeny, Jacob Elordi
Writer/Director: Sophia Coppola
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