The tradition of American biopics directed by men, regarding famous men of the 20th century,  has created within us a certain way of looking at these types of destinies as they unfold on the big screen. This perspective relied on a mix – in various doses, to varying degrees of fictionalization – between an obligatory deconstruction of a legend, and its reconstruction through fascination. More often than not, the woman that lay at the side of the famous man was much rather an accessory, one that serves the needs of the script. This is why, whenever this angle undergoes a radical change, this particular genre of cinema is suddenly challenging all over again.

In her latest film, Priscilla, presented in the Main Competition of the Venice Film Festival, Sofia Coppola topples this perspective. The provocation is already embedded within the very premise: the protagonist, as the title indicates, is Priscilla Presley (in an excellent performance by Cailee Spaeny), the very young wife of Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi). 

The famous singer is exclusively shown through the eyes of this woman, who finally gets her say in the story, and whom the film depicts from the moment, at the age of just 14, in 1959, she first meets Elvis and up to their break-up at the beginning of the seventies. Needless to say, the portrait that Sofia Coppola paints of her protagonist, based on her memoir, Elvis and Me, co-written with Sandra Harmon, is a feminist one. However, the nature of her empowerment – that is, her transition from an apparently naive girl to a mature woman who is ready to go down her own path, far from the burning sun that relegated her to his orbit – and that of the revisionist directorial gaze, which is looking upon the past from the present, are much more subtly developed than the script’s conventional structure and visual outline initially let on.

Priscilla is not a victim who has to beg for the spectator’s compassion. She is sincerely in love with Elvis, who is already a celebrity by the time she, a schoolgirl, gets acquainted with him at an American military base in West Germany. Strongly attracted to him, she is the one who is spurned, initially. She also enjoys the taste of a luxurious life (including her first experiences with drugs and playing the casino). Of course, there are constant tiny hints that suggest that this sort of existence, spent in the company of the era’s most adored man, comes at a price – and it might not be the happiest of them all (even though, in the end, Elvis is far from coming out of the story as a monster, he’s much rather a caricature).

This is where the film’s main gamble comes into play: Sophia Coppola reveals the devious ways that the society at the time slowly and irrevocably pushed the young woman into the role of a housewife and mother who was forced to accept the  (sometimes violent) whims and infidelities of their partner. To remain in the background, a fine accessory for glossy pictorials that exhort the joys of family life (especially when the husband is a star). To enter the mold that is shaped by the gaze of men (like the scene in which Priscilla is taken to a store to try on a few dresses, which are evaluated not just by Elvis himself, but also by his pals_.

A status that was all too hard to break out of – at least, not until the changes brought on by the advent of the seventies, as the film’s emancipatory ending suggests.

Ionuț Mareș

Journalist and film critic. Curator for some film festivals in Romania. At "Films in Frame" publishes interviews with both young and established filmmakers.