The Gilded Cage, Again
Sofia Coppola's entire career has been, in some reading, a sustained exploration of the same image: a beautiful woman in an extraordinary environment who is somehow, despite the beauty and the extraordinariness, constrained. Marie Antoinette at Versailles. Charlotte in her Tokyo hotel. Scarlett Johansson in the Hollywood hills. The gilded cage is Coppola's subject, her formal obsession, and she has returned to it repeatedly because — I think — the subject is not exhausted, because each new version finds something the previous versions didn't.
Priscilla Presley's story — her relationship with Elvis, which began when she was fourteen and he was a twenty-four-year-old star, which proceeded through Graceland and a very controlled courtship and a marriage that was always also a management of image — is perhaps the most explicit cage Coppola has found. The cage is architecturally real: there is a house, a wall, a world organized entirely around the comfort and requirements of one person who is not Priscilla.
Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla is extraordinary — a performance of extraordinary subtlety, of the specific quality of someone who has been made to be whatever someone else needs her to be and is slowly, incompletely, beginning to notice. The film is about that noticing. About the gap between the fairy tale and the experience of living inside it.
What Youth Understands
I kept thinking, watching this film, about what a fourteen-year-old can understand and what she can't, and what the people around her are responsible for understanding on her behalf. Priscilla is presented as someone who found the story irresistible — the romance, the stardom, the access to a world she'd never imagined — and this presentation is honest. Children and teenagers do find these stories irresistible. They lack the context that makes the predation visible.
Coppola doesn't moralize about this. She doesn't editorialize. She lets the images do the work: the girl getting younger looking as the story goes on, the house getting bigger, the isolation becoming more total. The film trusts the audience to understand what it's watching without being told what to think about it.
This restraint is the right choice and also the choice that some audiences will find frustrating. There is no moment where someone says the thing that needs to be said. There is only the accumulation of images that, together, say it anyway.
Cailee Spaeny won Best Actress at Venice. The award was the right one. The performance carries the whole weight of the film.
The Coppola Question
Coppola has been a polarizing director for as long as she's been a director — celebrated for her sensibility and her eye, criticized for the narrowness of her subject matter and the insularity of her world. There is something in these critiques. She does return to similar terrain. The privilege of her subjects is real.
But Priscilla complicates the criticism more than any previous film, because the privileged environment is explicitly the cage, because the extraordinary circumstances are explicitly the deprivation rather than the luxury, because the beauty of the production is in service of an argument about beauty as trap.
She has been building to this film for decades. The precision of it — the exactness with which it renders this particular gilded cage and this particular captivity — feels like a filmmaker who has finally found the subject that all the previous subjects were pointing toward.
I don't know what comes next. I know this one will last.
The film will be watched in ten years and it will still be clearly, uncomplicatedly about something — about the specific way a young woman can be remade in someone else's image, about the architecture of control that can feel like love from inside it, about the difficulty of leaving when the cage has become the whole world you know. These are not themes that age badly.
Coppola has made her career on a specific kind of seeing. Priscilla is the sharpest version of it. I don't know what she'll turn her attention to next. Whatever it is, I'll be watching.
