Both love story and Pygmalion nightmare, Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla” shows us a girl becoming a woman in a strange, intoxicating world. Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) is just 14 in 1959 when she meets Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi), then a 24-year-old Army soldier serving overseas — and the biggest rock ’n’ roll star in the world. Bored and unhappy in Germany, where her military family is stationed, Priscilla catches Elvis’ melancholy eye at a party and two lonely, homesick souls connect. “It’s really nice to talk to someone from home,” he says to her, in his pillowy drawl. An electric connection began, continuing through her teenage years (when 17-year-old Priscilla, with her parents’ permission, went to live with him at Graceland, his home in Tennessee), their eventual marriage and their ultimate divorce, only 14 years after that first meeting.


It’s clear why Coppola, whose languidly beautiful films (“The Virgin Suicides,” “Marie Antoinette,” “The Beguiled”) often explore the lives of sad-eyed teenage girls wandering through a strange new world, was drawn to this story. Spaeny’s quiet, watchful Priscilla strolls through Graceland — where she’s often alone, as Elvis goes off to tour or make movies — like a lonely, indolent queen. She tries hard to be more grown up: carefully applying winged eyeliner, styling her hair in an enormous bouffant (you can see the beads of hair spray, like drops of mist in the fog), listening as Elvis tells her what to wear, how to act, what to do. We see him as both a control-freak creep (“Promise me you’ll stay the way you are now,” he tells Priscilla, early on) and a bit of a lost soul — living in a bubble, unprepared for the solitude of stardom, stuck in permanent youth.

Jacob Elordi as Elvis, right, and Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla in “Priscilla.” (Philippe Le Sourd / A24 via The Associated Press)


Jacob Elordi as Elvis, right, and Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla in “Priscilla.” (Philippe Le Sourd / A24 via The Associated Press)

“Priscilla,” though told from its title character’s point of view, doesn’t pass judgment on Elvis (whose attentions toward an underage girl would surely have attracted more notice today); instead, Coppola tells the story through lush mood, meticulous art direction, swimmy music (not Presley’s) and her two actors’ gloriously big-screen faces. Though the movie sometimes seems a little underpopulated, particularly in its one oddly stylized concert scene, you forget that when Spaeny and Elordi gaze at each other; their relationship is deeply complicated, yet there’s a seemingly unbreakable bond.  


As with all of Coppola’s films, “Priscilla” leaves you with gorgeous, wistful images: a new watch, fastened sexily by Elvis to Priscilla’s wrist as the lights of a Christmas tree sparkle; Priscilla donning her false eyelashes before leaving for the hospital to give birth (both a display of her awareness that she’s always on display, and perhaps a way of exerting some control); Elvis smoking in their wedding pictures as she looks on, her face a mask of makeup. And I found myself haunted by a shot of Priscilla gazing out the window at Graceland, looking like a princess trapped in a castle, wondering what life might be like on the other side of the glass.