Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla” begins its retelling of Priscilla Presley’s life with a girly montage of pink toenails on a plush soft pink carpet, a lash strip ready to be plastered on a dark cat eye and hairspray to hold her luminous, dyed locks. You can’t forget the poodle skirt either. All the things that make a ’50s girl, a girl. It’s a look that will be drastically made over by her future lover through the course of the film.
Based on Presley’s memoir, “Elvis and Me,” Coppola’s take on the life of the girl once known as Priscilla Beaulieu is biting in establishing her teen girlhood and how her life turns upside down when she meets Elvis Presley in war-stricken Germany in 1959. The film paints the start of their union of a very lonely girl meeting a very lonely, older celebrity crush. They fall in love and the rest is history. We’ve seen it, we’ve read about it but we’ve never really experienced it through Priscilla’s eyes.
Asking a child to stay the same is a way to reinforce his power to dictate who she is.
We see how Priscilla evolves from an unassuming 14-year-old into the slightly more mature, yet still underage, object of Elvis’ desires. Unknowingly to Priscilla, being that object of desire comes with some strict stipulations. One of those stipulations is how Elvis controls almost every aspect of a naive Priscilla’s life. She leaves her hometown and high school in hopes of being Elvis’ committed girlfriend. But she doesn’t understand what that entails until she is left alone almost every day in his Graceland mansion. Whenever Elvis is present and not off touring or on a film set, he begins to mold her to his liking and in his own striking image.
This transformation seems innocent enough when it starts with a gift as Priscilla and Elvis’ relationship deepens in Germany. Elvis gives her a beautiful, dainty gold watch and quietly demands, “Promise me you’ll stay the way you are.” Of course, she…
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