In 2021, Baz Luhrmann seized the Elvis Presley myth with a biopic honoring everything extravagant and monstrous that the character could contain. The result was a monumental circus act, rich in gleaming outfits and insane physical performances, which preferred to tell the story of the poisonous influence of Colonel Parker, the impresario with the air of a big man played by Tom Hanks, than the inner torments of the deceased star at the age of 42. Youth, family, disappointments and decadence were all covered in just a few minutes, while trying not to offend the rights holders of Elvis’ work who had come to treat themselves to an object entirely to the glory of the singer.
And by dint of touching on certain passages in the King’s life to favor the visual and sound whirlwind, the film ended up omitting the words of an essential character in the construction of the rocker’s legend: the one who was his wife between 1967 and 1973. Without wanting to respond directly to Baz Luhrmann’s feature film, Sofia Coppola offers here a counterpoint to the “official story” by adapting Elvis and me, the memoir of Priscilla Ann Presley. In this work published in 1985, the ex-wife recounted her meeting at 14 with the singer, then ten years older than her, the birth of their romance and his move to Graceland, Elvis’s famous home. which will slowly but surely become a golden prison. Where Priscilla will patiently wait for her husband’s return from the front of fame and will discover through the press the dissolute life he leads without her, frozen in this doll’s house which only has light on the facade.
Since his first feature film Virgin Suicides in 1999, Sofia Coppola made fading youth and the moral languor caused by the marital cell her two favorite subjects. By Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation to Kirsten Dunst in Marie Antoinette, the director’s camera regularly focused on the characters of women who, driven by the hope of accessing a world much more exciting than their own, ended up losing their way. They then watched the absence of any familiarity caused by their wanderings turn against them. Priscilla Presley is therefore the ideal figure to continue this exploration of the gift of self as learning of identity, she who dedicated 13 years of her life to a man whom she only knew in fits and starts, due to his goings and goings came between tours and film shoots.
In truth, she especially saw the less glamorous and more insidious facets: his obsession with the image which will condemn her to an ascetic life, his ruthless nature control freak, choosing the outfits she wears in his company but also manipulating her desire. Swung from one paternalism to another, Priscilla, played by a perfect Cailee Spaeny of thwarted introversion, loses her free will to turn into an ethereal doll that is exhibited in an immense ghost house, partitioned on all sides without being doesn’t really know what she has to hide. As she is about to give birth, Priscilla is in no hurry to get into the car taking her to the hospital. She must first put on her false eyelashes and ensure that the image she projects in the real world, in front of the cameras and the people who pass her, will be the one Elvis wanted. This simple scene, as graceful as it is chilling, could practically synthesize the entire work that Sofia Coppola has been creating with great delicacy and sophistication for more than two decades.
2024-01-03 23:23:12
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