It’s a case of kissin’ cousins twice removed.
Sofia Coppola’s bio pic, PRISCILLA, focuses on Priscilla Presley who, at one time, was sort of related. For a short period, Sofia’s cousin, Nicolas Cage, was Priscilla’s son in law.
The events depicted in PRISCILLA predate that relationship, beginning in 1959 when the fourteen year old Priscilla meets the twenty-four year old Presley in West Germany while Elvis was doing his nasho and she was a military brat.
In 1963, Priscilla’s parents gave consent for 17-year-old Priscilla to join Elvis in Memphis— where she attended Immaculate Conception High School, an all-girls Catholic school, while living at Graceland.
Her story spans from age 14—when she first meets Elvis as a bored, lonely Air Force brat living in Germany—to 24, when she departs the candy-coloured dreamland of Graceland as a young mother hungry to explore her own unwritten future.
Priscilla, like Princess Diana, is whisked as a teenager into a life of royalty, albeit that of a particularly American variety. And while the atmosphere and accoutrements (not to mention the drugs and rock and roll) of 1960s Memphis make for a vastly different world from Buckingham Palace, the parallels and similarities are plain to see.
Priscilla’s prism of perception is seen through the filter of a teenager chasing a tenuous romantic dream, a courtship and coupling that started as an enchanting closeness before becoming estranged and claustrophobic, creating a growing urge to break out.
Cailee Spaeny is very good as Priscilla but in verisimilitude it is Jacob Elordi as Elvis that casts the great shadow, a remarkable rendition of the complexities of Elvis’s magnetism. Part of that complexity was Elvis the gloomy groomer, the borderline paedophile, and pistol fetishist.
Another performance of note is Dagmara Dominczyk as Priscilla’s conflicted mother, Anne, a woman caught between a profound urge to shield her daughter from a perilous relationship and potential heartbreak, and the desire to help Priscilla pursue the life she so determinedly wants.
Coppola eschews packing the soundtrack with Elvis songs, instead using variations on the Frankie Avalon song ‘Venus,’ which was playing when Priscilla first met Elvis. It becomes Priscilla’s theme in the film.
In the movie’s final moments comes Dolly Parton’s classic hit of wistful heartbreak, ‘I Will Always Love You’, the lyrics a mix of sorrow and excitement that accompanied Priscilla’s choice to leave Graceland and start again.
Ironically, when Elvis asks Priscilla early in the film what her favourite song of his is, she replies “Heartbreak Hotel”. She checked in and dwelt a decade there before checking out.