Priscilla

 

Director Sofia Coppola

Cailee Spaeny with Best Actress prize from Venice

Elvis and Priscilla

Coppola on the set with Spaeny and Jacob Elordi

Sofia Coppola with Priscilla Presley

PRISCILLA               B+                                                                                                             USA  Italy  (113 mi)  2023  d: Sofia Coppola

I wanted to write about love and precious, wonderful moments and ones filled with grief and disappointments, about a man’s triumphs and defeats, much of it with a child-woman at his side, feeling and experiencing his pain and joys as if they were one.

—Priscilla Presley, from the epilogue of Elvis and Me, 1985

Sofia Coppola is an acquired taste, and not everyone gets her, including yours truly, where her career has largely been viewed as a series of hits or misses, with Lost in Translation (2002), Somewhere (2010), and now this film remaining the most successful examples of her highly personalized, semi-autobiographical style.  Yet do we really need another Elvis story, coming so soon after Baz Luhrmann’s ELVIS (2022)?  Probably not, but with each of these directors you’re likely to get a mystifyingly unique take on a familiar subject.  Having grown up in the era of Elvis, seeing him plastered on magazine covers, he was the Hollywood matinee idol in the music world, yet his celebrity status was elevated beyond comprehension.  And that’s where Coppola comes in, as that’s a world she not only knows but is intimately familiar with in ways the rest of us aren’t.  So perhaps she’s as good as anyone to guide us through this journey.  The beauty of this film is it’s not really about Elvis, who is a gargantuan force, obviously, but purely secondary, as the entire film, literally every moment, is seen through the young and impressionable eyes of Priscilla, who remains starstruck by the powerful presence and superstar power of a man who is ten years older, already known as the King, an icon in the music industry, one of the most popular and influential artists of the 20th century, where his popularity was unprecedented, providing an almost fairy tale existence of wealth beyond her wildest dreams, where this becomes a Beauty and the Beast saga.  Unlike Coppola’s MARIE ANTOINETTE (2006), which was dripping with artificiality, this is a fairly realistic but minimalist portrayal, providing an exclusive look at what went on behind the scenes, confining much of the story to the bedroom, living room, and other private quarters, where so much of it takes place in the dark, shutting out the outside world, which is a fitting metaphor for the cloistered isolation of fame, where her suffocating marriage is viewed as a gilded cage, becoming something of a metaphorical prison.  Adapted from Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir Elvis and Me (co-written with Sandra Harmon), she is listed as an executive producer, though the film does not have the support of the rest of Presley’s family, which denied the rights to any of his music, though early in the film an instrumental version of “Love Me Tender” can be heard.  Nonetheless, at the Venice Film Festival premiere, Priscilla was reduced to tears while the film received a 7-minute standing ovation.  Coppola simply doesn’t make films like anybody else, where each is a unique experience, giving viewers an opportunity to experience the familiar with a new awareness, as this is a much different perspective on both Elvis and Priscilla, providing an intimate and unflinching human portrait, recalling another famous figure in Pablo Larraín’s Jackie (2016), yet Coppola’s restrained and thoroughly impressionable style can be confounding to viewers who expect a coherent storyline, or a recognizable biographical timeline, where this is a quieter and more understated character study that is essentially a love story, with a killer soundtrack that couldn’t be more mesmerizing, providing a poetic, internalized narrative, while the personalized nature of the subject matter is unmistakable. 

While Lisa Marie Presley (who died from a heart attack earlier this year), the only child of Elvis and Priscilla Presley, praised the Baz Luhrmann film that earned close to $300 million dollars worldwide, which explored the relationship between Elvis and his longtime manager Colonel Tom Parker, she had nothing but scorn for Coppola’s script, revealed in exchanged emails with the director, claiming “My father only comes across as a predator and manipulative.  As his daughter, I don’t read this and see any of my father in this character.  I don’t read this and see my mother’s perspective of my father.  I read this and see your shockingly vengeful and contemptuous perspective and I don’t understand why?”  However she died before ever seeing the film, though it was not likely to change her view, as she was the sole executor of the Presley estate and extremely protective of her father’s legacy.  Priscilla Presley, on the other hand, was free to express her own life without any restrictions or limitations, and praised Coppola’s film for its realism.  Her book was actually dedicated to Lisa Marie, and was a #1 New York Times bestseller, yet the content of the film that Lisa Marie found so objectionable originated in her mother’s autobiographical book, as there’s nothing fictitiously added in Coppola’s version that’s not found in the book.  One unmistakable connection exists between Lisa Marie Presley and Sofia Coppola, as they are both daughters of famous celebrities.  All of that is a curious backdrop to the film, where what’s perhaps the most surprising is the age of Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny) when she first met Elvis (Jacob Elordi) at a party, as she was only 14, and in 9th grade, while he was the biggest rock star in the world, with Elvis acknowledging “Why, you’re just a baby.”  How do you discreetly address the rock ‘n’ roll dilemma of grown men romancing young school girls?  Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, the Grateful Dead, and dozens of others regularly performed the sexist blues standard “Good Morning Little School Girl” and no one blinked an eye.   When Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13-year old cousin, it caused an uproar, but he continued recording well into his 70’s.  While this is an unsettling reminder of how often “little school girls” are on the periphery of pop music, a troublesome aspect of the male-dominated music industry, Coppola’s film doesn’t shy away from it, with Presley even seen performing Lewis’s signature number Jerry Lee Lewis -Whole Lotta Shakin Going On (Live 1964) YouTube (7:02) at a party, but she also doesn’t moralize over what was obviously a more accepted practice at the time.  Instead she chooses a different way to present the story, where it all unfolds like a dream, with inescapable realities that suggest problematic behavior, but others have gone down that same road as Elvis who died at the age of 42 after struggling with a decades-long substance abuse problem, which worsened in the years leading up to his death, where celebrity status leads to pills, drugs, or alcohol, and a fractured reality, where the history of rock ‘n’ roll is littered with the dead bodies of male and female legends who died before their time.

Set in 1959 near a U.S. military base in Germany, Elvis was drafted into the Army near the peak of his fame, while Priscilla’s stepfather was a career officer, U.S. Air Force Captain Beaulieu (Ari Cohen).  Having grown up in Texas, when we first meet Priscilla she is an overly shy yet pretty girl who is used to being unsettled, unhappily moving from base to base every few years, now finding herself on the other side of the world, much like Coppola moving from movie set to movie set during her childhood, going to different schools in different towns, attending kindergarten in the Philippines during the extended shooting of APOCALYPSE NOW (1979).  While sitting in a local diner catering to American military families, listening to Frankie Avalon’s “Venus,” Frankie Avalon - Venus (1959) 4K YouTube (2:25), she is approached by an Air Force serviceman who asked if she liked Elvis Presley, as he and his wife would be attending a Presley party at his home this weekend and asked if she’d like to come along, assuring her family that he’d be her chaperone.  This simple gesture started it all, literally plucked from obscurity, finding it hard to believe she’d make any kind of impression on a man so famous, but he’s immediately taken by her beauty and innocence, asking a lot of questions about what kind of music the kids back home listen to these days, sharing a first kiss, where she is positively enthralled he actually “liked” her and wanted to see her again.  Unable to concentrate in school the next day, Coppola’s impeccable musical choice is Tommy James and the Shondells - Crimson & Clover - YouTube (3:25), with love blossoming in the air (“Now I don’t hardly know her, but I think I could love her”), as Priscilla is seen with a slight smile on her face as she gracefully walks through the high school corridor as if on a cloud.  And the dream has begun.  According to Priscilla during a Venice Film Festival press conference, “Elvis would pour his heart out to me in every way in Germany: his fears, his hopes, the loss of his mother—which he never ever got over.  And I was the person who really, really sat there to listen and to comfort him.  That was really our connection.”  After regularly seeing each other, developing more than an infatuation, though always playing a passive, subordinate role, she’s positively heartbroken when his tour of duty is over and he returns to the States, as despite his many promises, she doesn’t hear from him again in years, thinking he’s forgotten all about her while she follows his budding movie career in all the magazines, including the much publicized affairs with his female costars.  Then suddenly out of the blue, he calls and wants her to visit his Memphis estate in Graceland, sending her airfare, welcomed by his friends and business associates, where the luxuriousness of the massive estate is hard to even imagine, but they take a side detour to Las Vegas where he introduces her to his prescription pills, amphetamines (Dexedrine) and barbiturates (Placidyls), uppers and downers that he initially stole from his mother (who was trying to lose weight) when he was in high school, the same lethal combination that led to the substance abuse problems of country singer Johnny Cash, which is something he regularly utilizes to get through the punishing work schedule arranged by his manager, Colonel Tom Parker (who is never shown onscreen).  When she returns back from her visit, she looks like a ghost of her former self, sending red flags to her parents, but Elvis convinces them to allow her to live with his family and staff at Graceland, while promising her parents she will enroll in Catholic school to complete her senior year, where she becomes an object of fascination to the other students.   

Incredulously, Priscilla’s drug use continues, taking a pill each morning before school, which may help get her through the day, but her concentration and mental focus is lost in the fog, leaving her scraping by just trying to graduate, resorting to unethical means (cheating) to do so, while the unorthodox nature of her relationship stands out, with a domineering partner who has an overcontrolling nature and a vicious temper problem, as Priscilla wasn’t allowed to work or have outside interests, but was required to be at home when he “needed” her, even as he was away for weeks or months at a time.  Elvis picked out her wardrobe, make-up, and hairstyle, refusing to allow her input, actually threatening to send her back to her parents when she disagreed, reducing her to tears, even doing her packing before relenting and reminding her how lucky she was to be with him, as any woman in America would love to be in her place.  Part of his celebrity mystique is women threw themselves at him, sent him love letters, and willingly offered themselves in the wild chance that he might agree.  While Elvis projected himself as a sex symbol and free spirit, he was extraordinarily conservative, believing the male was the stronger sex and that women needed to know their place, insisting that she needed to remain faithful to him even while he engaged in multiple affairs.  He was obsessed with firearms and loved to take target practice on the premises, providing Priscilla with a matching pistol for each dress.  What’s most evident is that Elvis was a grown-up kid, enjoying playing pranks, roughhousing, and hanging out with the guys, surrounding himself with a circle of friends who showed blind allegiance (his all-male entourage was nicknamed the Memphis Mafia), where he was always allowed to get his way, growing furious with her if she showed any signs of resistance, while denying all rumors of sexual romances with other movie stars he worked with, especially Ann Margaret, despite the saturated headlines in all the magazines and newspapers.  To his credit, he could be very persuasive, where his sweet talk could be utterly charming, and she could fall under his spell, with the euphoria of their marriage evoking a musical reference to the outlaw lovers in Terrence Malick’s BADLANDS (1973), Badlands • Gassenhauer • Carl Orff YouTube (2:50).  While much of this sounds manipulative and controlling, there can be no doubt that they also loved each other, where the film follows the dozen or so years they spent together, told with an extraordinary tenderness, paying closer attention to the various stages of female adolescence and young adulthood, which is what attracted Coppola to the material, as this mirrors her own transition into womanhood.  Coppola’s marriage dissolved during the making of Lost in Translation, while the inevitable train wreck of Priscilla’s marital purgatory also comes to an end, where her boxed-in powerlessness is replaced by separate lives and a world of new opportunities, moving to Los Angeles in her late twenties to celebrate her newly discovered independence, finally empowered to act on her own, beautifully expressed by Santana’s Oye Como Va YouTube (4:17) with the palm trees lining the roadway, yet what stands out is the resolve it took to leave such a powerful man who completely transformed her life.  Cailee Spaeny is onscreen in nearly every shot, awarded the Best Actress prize at the Venice Film Festival, where her mostly subdued and understated performance resonates, especially when compared to the more volatile emotional mix that was Elvis, yet the coup de grâce is the finale, where the inspired choice is Dolly Parton’s transcendent vision, Dolly Parton - I Will Always Love You (Official Audio) YouTube (2:55), supposedly the song Elvis sang to Priscilla after the completion of their divorce, leaving viewers utterly transfixed by the experience.

Tokyo-Ga

Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu   

Actor Chishû Ryû   

Chishû Ryû visiting the grave of Ozu in Tokyo-ga   

Ozu grave   

Getting the shot with Yûharu Atsuta   

German directors Wim Wenders meets Werner Herzog atop Tokyo Tower in Tokyo-ga   

TOKYO-GA               B                   
Germany  USA  (92 mi)  1985  d:  Wim Wenders

If in our century something sacred still existed… if there were something like a sacred treasure of the cinema, then for me that would have to be the work of the Japanese director, Yasujiro Ozu. He made fifty-four films. Silent films in the Twenties, black-and-white films in the Thirties and Forties, and finally color films until his death on December 12th, 1963, on his sixtieth birthday.

With extreme economy of means, and reduced to but the bare essentials, Ozu’s films, again and again, tell the same simple story, always of the same people, and the same city, Tokyo. This chronicle spanning nearly 40 years, depicts the transformation of life in Japan. Ozu’s films deal with the slow deterioration of the Japanese family, and thereby, with the deterioration of the national identity. But they do so not by pointing with dismay at what is new, Western, or American, but by lamenting with an unindulged sense of nostaligia the loss taking place at the same time.

As thoroughly Japanese as they are, these films are, at the same time, universal. In them, I’ve been able to recognize all families, in all the countries of the world, as well as my parents, my brother and myself. For me, never before and never again since has the cinema been so close to its essence and its purpose: to present an image of man in our century, a usable, true and valid image, in which he not only recognizes himself but from which, above all, he may learn about himself.

Ozu’s work does not need my praise and such a sacred treasure of the cinema could only reside in the realm of the imagination. And so, my trip to Tokyo was in no way a pilgrimage. I was curious as to whether I still could track down something from this time, whether there was still anything left of this work. Images perhaps, or even people…Or whether so much would have changed in Tokyo in the twenty years since Ozu’s death that nothing would be left to find.

—Wim Wenders opening narration, Ozu Notes 2 Richie - Willamette University

Made between English-language film Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin) (1987), Wenders actually takes a road trip to Japan in the spring of 1983, taking a break from shooting the American film in search of discovering any remnants of late Japanese director Yasuhirō Ozu in today’s Tokyo, some twenty years after he died, using a film language that is personal, powerful and evocative, described by Wenders as a “film diary,” but it's also one of the finest examples of a filmmaker using the medium to honor the work of another, much like the Olivier Assayas pilgrimage to Taiwan when shooting HHH – A Portrait of Hou Hsiao-hsien (1997).  With Wenders narrating the film, it ranges from explicit focus on Ozu’s filmmaking, where Wenders interviews Ozu’s regular cinematographer, Yûharu Atsuta, and one of Ozu’s favorite actors, Chishû Ryû, using clips from his films, to chaotic and often unsettling contemporary scenes of Tokyo, becoming entranced by the wider landscape while observing the country and its culture, where the film screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival.  In distinct Wenders style, the opening shots of Tokyo are completely modernistic, with a dynamic sounding synthesizer soundtrack by Dick Tracy (Laurent Petitgand, Meche Mamecier, and Chico Rojo Ortega), Dick Tracy - TOKYO-GA [OST (19:13), that shows little compatibility with Ozu.  Framing the opening and closing of the film with images from Ozu’s TOKYO STORY (1953), Wenders goes looking for many of the iconic images that reoccur throughout Ozu’s career, the trains, rooftops, elevated electric wires, laundry hanging from a line, boats chugging slowly across the harbor, and children at play, then superimposes images from another filmmaker into the middle of his own film, which has a way of aesthetically communing with another artist, making the film itself specifically about filmmakers and filmmaking, where certainly part of the film’s desire is not only to pay tribute to those that came before him, but to examine the director’s own place among the pantheon of cinema itself.  Throughout the film, Wenders is moved to contemplation, like this particular moment where he photographs his own reflection in the window of a moving train, “We gasp and give a start when we suddenly discover something true or real in a movie, be it nothing more than the gesture of a child in the background, or a bird flying across the frame, or a cloud casting its shadow over the scene for but an instant.  It’s a rarity in today’s cinema to find such moments of truth, for people or objects to show themselves as they really are.”

Through Wenders’ eyes, Tokyo is an often overwhelming urban landscape, viewed as nearly incomprehensible while he searches out the obsession with all-night pachinko parlors, lined with rows of cramped players sitting next to one another, each lost in a game of mechanical solitaire, followed each night by a lone “nail man” who meticulously checks each of the machines after closing time, observing with a voice that’s flat and emotionless, “This game induces a kind of hypnosis.  Winning is hardly important.  But, time passes, you lose touch with yourself for a while, you merge with the machine, and perhaps, you forget, what you always wanted to forget,” with Wenders suggesting the game actually numbs the lingering, post-traumatic effects of World War II.  But he also discovers the presence of people lined up at a golf driving range sitting atop a skyscraper, watching the collective motion as they each practice their own swing, or swat baseballs from the roof of a department store, or discover a miniature golf stadium, while also discovering a prevalence for fake food displays in restaurant windows, a culturally unique way of promoting their menu, a stark contrast to the photographs that look decidedly less appetizing in fast food restaurants, with the director even venturing into a factory that manufactures lifelike, wax models of Japanese food, amusingly noting that the companies let him film everything except the employees eating.  While riding in trains, including an underground train system with high-tech tube maps, or taxi cabs offering channel surfing television options, we witness the constant presence of street advertising, the mesmerizing symmetry of criss-crossing commuter trains, or citizens in mass ascending or descending escalators, while on the street teenagers have already adopted an American sock-hop identity, wearing jeans or poodle skirts, saddle shoes, and club-embroidered (Tokyo Rockabilly Club), satin windbreakers dancing to the music of the 50’s and 60’s, with the guys doing their best Elvis Presley imitation, resorting to rare body contact when learning new dance steps, but we also catch an occasional glimpse of the elderly, a person reading manga, or an incalcitrant young child that simply refuses his mother’s insistence that he walk in a train station.  For Wenders, “The more the reality of Tokyo struck me as a torrent of impersonal, unkind, threatening, and yes, even inhuman images, the greater and powerful became in my mind the images of the loving and ordered world of the mythical city of Tokyo that I knew from the films of Yasujirō Ozu.”

While there is a luscious beauty to witnessing picnics in parks during the height of cherry blossom season, including a lingering impression of watching children play baseball on a cemetery path overrun by a cascade of blossoms, the key to the film is the presence of significant visitors, where there is a chance encounter with French filmmaker and essayist Chris Marker in a small bar appropriately called “La Jetee,” as Marker was working on the finishing touches of his own incredible film masterpiece Sans Soleil (1983) at the time, while fellow compatriot Werner Herzog also turns up dressed in a suit and tie atop the Tokyo Tower, an Eiffel Tower inspired substitute, where Herzog looks so out of place from his natural habitat, staring out over the artifice of high-rises and modern office buildings, uttering something superfluous like, “When I look out here I see that everything is cluttered up.  There are hardly any images to be found.  One has to dig deep down like an archeologist.”  But Wenders is on another kind of mission, “just to look, without wanting to prove anything.”  While it comes as no surprise that the smaller, more intimate world of Ozu has been swallowed up by a rapidly overgrown, technologically advanced, neon cityscape, where giant exteriors have drown out all suggestions of a quieter, more reflective world, the most powerful images of the film come from lengthy interviews with two of Ozu’s closest collaborators, now both in their 80’s, including Chishû Ryû, the director’s favorite actor who appeared in over 35 of his 54 films, always playing a more mature father figure much older than himself, giving all credit for his performances to his illustrious director, suggesting he would never have been a star without him.  Ryû takes Wenders to see Ozu’s grave, marked with a single Japanese character that stands for “nothingness.”  Camera operator Yûharu Atsuta started out as an assistant cameraman during the silent era and after 15 years was promoted to cameraman, working only for Ozu for the next 25 years, claiming he was a man of few words, but cared deeply for his crew, knowing precisely how he wanted films shot, where we see him enact how he setup those tatami shots for Ozu.  Preferring to shoot indoors on a controlled set, the director was bothered by observers during location shooting, so outside shots were mostly transitional, including his memorable litany of trains that appeared in nearly every picture.  Ozu would check out locations only by foot, with Atsuta saying “they would only stop looking when they passed out,” likely holed up in a neighborhood bar, which could lead to an appearance in one of his films, becoming a place where lonely fathers drown their sorrows.  Both men were proud to serve Ozu, passing up greater salary opportunities to stick with him, where their sincerity is apparent, with Atsuta displaying a prized gift from Ozu, a custom stopwatch used by the director to meticulously time his shots.  Trying to explain why he retired after Ozu’s death, Atsuta breaks down in tears and cannot continue, literally humbled by the moment.  Despite Wenders’ contention that the world of Ozu’s Japan no longer exists, his revealing interviews suggest otherwise, where perhaps it can only be found by the traveler who is in no hurry, someone like Ozu, who has the time to sit and observe the minute details of people’s behavior.