In the Flesh: Priscilla

Elvis (Jacob Elordi) speaks softly. Elvis asks Priscilla’s (Cailee Spaeny) father permission before taking her out to the movies. He won’t take her virginity. He calls her parents sir and ma’am. As his whiteness allows him to smuggle popular and influential but culturally unacceptable Black rock and roll and blues music into mainstream culture, his gentle affect and Southern manners allow him to groom and prey upon a child of fourteen as her parents look on in befuddled dismay, too ineffectual and emotionally constipated to do anything but allow what they clearly realize is a disaster to unfold. Director Sofia Coppola uses Spaeny’s doll-like physique to great effect, constantly reminding us how diminutive this child is, how easily controlled by all the towering men around her, like her whole life is one long iteration of the famous elevator shot in Silence of the Lambs. That’s clearly part of her appeal to the rock star, whose fixation on virginity persists even after he finally takes hers. Having never been properly parented, he projects his own lost childhood onto her, oblivious to the fact that by doing so he’s erasing hers in turn.

The film deftly walks us through Priscilla’s induction into the cultish world of Graceland, defined as much by Elvis’s avoidance, unexamined fetishes, and immaturity as by his whims and temper. She begins to learn to think like a publicist, to style and pose not just her body but her activities alone and with her famous husband. Her costuming reflects her state of mind in relation to his, hewing to solid colors when she wants to appeal to him or demonstrate submission and to patterns when she wishes to project anger and discontent. She begins to understand that he fears being left as much or more than he feels compelled to remind others he could leave at any time. In one memorable sequence she adjusts her grip on a pool float repeatedly in order to properly frame a kiss with her soon-to-be-husband, though it’s not clear whether or not they’re being photographed. Much of her access to Elvis’s emotional life comes through the medium of tabloid journalism, and so she correctly intuits that she must come to understand herself through the same lens.

Spaeny plays the youthful Priscilla as a woman-child who, having been handed a miracle any girl in America would kill for, knows she ought to be happy and is unable to reconcile this with the certainty that she isn’t. Her ongoing misery is almost palpable, her life as empty and dimly lit as Graceland’s huge, spotless, and vacant rooms. Coppola’s decision to light Priscilla in a period-accurate fashion gives it a haunted, claustrophobic feel, a cloudy sort of gloom creeping into every interior shot. It plays well with Elordi’s dramatic features and brooding affect, often lost not so much in shadow as in a kind of sepia murk. How could anyone experience happiness in a world like this, the unheard voice of the unseen Colonel Tom Parker delivering edicts from on high to a house where family and business have become synonymous, where nothing happens without a gallery of Elvis’s friends and cousins to hoot and clap approvingly. Even when it’s full of life and music, there’s nobody home.