Tropic Sprockets / Priscilla

By Ian Brockway

Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla,” focusing on the day-to-day life of the young Priscilla Presley is not for the timid. [Showtimes and trailer at Tropiccinema.com.]

The first shot shows a pink shag carpet under Priscilla‘s feet. Seen close up to fill the screen, the carpet resembles raw hamburger meat. Though it may be a stretch, there is symbolism here: the realm of Elvis Presley is animalistic, carnal, and bloody, not for the virginal.

One sees 14-year-old Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny) at a soda shop in Germany being asked by an Elvis aide if she would like to attend a party at Elvis’s home. Priscilla reluctantly agrees, but her parents are horrified. Needless to say, the aide smoothes things over.

Elvis (Jacob Elordi) is shy and nervous, but his smile displays a magnetic charm. He reveals to Priscilla that he just lost his mother. As a result of the confession, Priscilla is smitten and head over heels. But due to Priscilla’s young age, the two conduct their romance covertly.

Elvis becomes a Svengali, manipulating and controlling the young girl and insisting on her wardrobe and the style of her hair. Elvis subjugates Priscilla, deliberately, and without mercy in some scenes. Whenever Priscilla intimately asserts herself, Elvis retreats as if frozen. Elvis is only comfortable, when he alone is in control, unilaterally with a purpose. Many of the episodes here are very eerie if not downright creepy.

The rock icon takes to wearing black with dark shades. Priscilla is dictated to very like a slave. Such segments make for difficult viewing.

There is a brief flash of humor when Elvis and his circle meet the sisters from Priscilla’s Catholic school. The nuns love him, and his group resembles a blend of gangsters and vampires with black skinny ties.

Sometimes Elvis is a man child, hesitant and nervous. Sometimes he is an engine of the night, violent and hostile. More often than not though, he is an impassable shadow, a dark cloud saturnine and strange, a gaseous shape in sequins and leather that hovers over the young Priscilla, making independent movement a futile circus act.

This film is darker and decidedly more somber than Baz Luhrmann’s earlier epic Elvis, but this film is no less authentic and all the more interesting.

Cailee Spaeny is intense in her innocence. Jacob Elordi is fearless in his no holds barred approach in showing Elvis to be a reptilian vampire but not without heart, albeit of the cold-blooded variety.

The finality of “Priscilla” points to something almost supernatural. As in the director’s previous work “Marie Antoinette,” Priscilla Presley is royalty forced to leave her palace, in this case because her husband is leather-clad, monstrous, and uncompromising.

What was once a bright Shangri-La is now a gold River Styx, a land of the dead. All things in Graceland, from the gates and the guitars to the screaming fans revolve with a grim regularity, a predetermination that is eerie and inescapable.

Write Ian at [email protected].

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