With the quietly extraordinary Priscilla, Sofia Coppola mines the inner life of the girl who fell for Elvis Presley
BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK
Cailee Spaeny on the set of Priscilla, from Sofia Coppola’s Archive (2023), published by MACK
HAVE YOU EVER HAD AN INTENSE EXPERIENCE—fallen madly in love, say—only to look back years later and feel it had happened to a different person, a person who had walked through a dream, and survived it, to get to the self you were destined to become? That’s the feeling Sofia Coppola captures in her quietly extraordinary Priscilla, which is adapted from the story told by Priscilla Presley in her candid and moving 1985 memoir Elvis and Me. Maybe we all have to survive our teenage dreams; the things we want at age 14 are rarely the best for the long term, and luckily, most of us don’t get them. But the teenage Priscilla Presley got what she yearned for. Priscilla invites us to walk side by side with her, but not so we can ultimately be punished by the fallacy of her dream; rather, this is a story about deep, cavern-like loneliness, and how one person’s responding to the loneliness of another can be both an adventure and a destiny. So much of being a teenage girl is just waiting for your chance to be; this is the story of one who refused to wait.
Cailee Spaeny plays the 14-year-old Priscilla, an Air Force kid living in 1959 Wiesbaden, West Germany, with her siblings and parents—her dad is a captain. Coppola captures young Priscilla’s ennui—and her seraphic, unassuming beauty—as she sits at an air-base snack bar, the moony strains of Frankie Avalon’s “Venus,” a song about wanting the unattainable, swirling around her. (It’s a starry-eyed cover by the band Phoenix.) A good-looking older guy asks her if she likes Elvis Presley. Would she like to meet him? It seems creepy. Priscilla is sure her protective parents won’t let her go.
But the guy meets with her father and persuades him all will be OK. Priscilla has no idea what to wear, what will be the most pleasing and grownup—she can’t wear her Easter dress! she moans to her mother—and is whisked off in the car Elvis has sent for her. When she arrives at his house, he’s rollicking at the piano, surrounded by admiring young women—as opposed to teenage girls. He’s not just a teen fantasy; he’s a man, 24 years old. Eventually, he makes his way over to this shy but self-possessed young person and asks if she’s a junior or senior in high school. When he finds out she’s in the ninth grade, he laughs, and says, “You’re just a bay-buh,” the last syllable
