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.

Low Down

LOW DOWN         C+                       

USA  (114 mi)  2014  ‘Scope d:  Jeff Preiss          Official Site

One day we’re walking down the street, passing a newsstand, when I stop and pick up a magazine (maybe Life) with Thelonious Monk of the cover. I kiss it, and say, ‘Hi Monk.’ Dad, combusting with pride, picks me up, looks at me with those beautiful gray-green eyes, and says: ‘From now on, you’re not just my baby, you’re my ace-one-boon-white-coon.’ That, he would claim, was the day we forever connected, and became more to each other than everything.

I  loved him out of all proportion, as only a daughter could.

—Amy-Jo Albany (Elle Fanning)

There’s usually an intriguing allure to films centered around the outer fringes of society, that delve into a bohemian, neon-lit subterranean world exposing hardships of the human kind that border on madness, where the pursuit of artistic freedom becomes more than a passionate endeavor but a moral obligation, often lost in the smoky haze of narcotics and drug abuse, where in the words of American poet Allen Ginsberg in his epic 1955 poem Howl, Howl, Parts I & II | Academy of American Poets:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,

starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking

for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly

connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking

in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating

across the tops of cities contemplating jazz

Written by his daughter Amy-Jo Albany (Elle Fanning), Low Down:  Junk, Jazz, and Other Fairy Tales from Childhood is a 2003 memoir by the daughter of a legendary but obscure jazz pianist Joe Albany (John Hawkes), one of the few white pianists to play Bebop with Charlie Parker in the 40’s and 50’s, but also a heroin addict and prison convict for a major part of his life.  Growing up on the dingy side of Hollywood among addicts, prostitutes, and various social misfits, the film is a dim reminder of what jagged edges some lives become, where every day is a struggle to survive, much of it lost on wasted opportunities.  Less about Albany’s chronic drug troubles and run-ins with the law, the film is more about a young adolescent’s rose-colored view of her father, trying to make sense out of the chaotic turmoil that was her life growing up in the 70’s, where she substitutes her interior heartache with larger-than-life embellishments of her father, making him out to be some kind of mythical hero.  Blind to the adult realities, her father a junky, her absent mother Sheila (Lena Headey), a former singer and full-time alcoholic, the overall tone is confusing and the story uneven and unfocused, filled with various recollections that rarely get under the surface, basically becoming a primer course on how to destroy your life and the loved ones around you.  Through it all, however, she prevails and writes the book, which is the point of the film, though despite a gutty performance by Fanning, she’s not really the interesting part of the story.  Joe’s the guy we’re interested in, as there’s so much about him we don’t know, but his life is largely unexplored and for long periods of time he’s not even in the picture, as Jo is shipped off to grandmother’s house, none other than Glenn Close, a six-time Oscar nominee looking surprisingly like Robin Williams in MRS. DOUBTFIRE (1993).  On Friday nights Gram is glued to the screen watching boxing matches, and on one wall in her home she has on display that legenday photo of Black Panther Party co-founder and Minister of Defense Huey P. Newton (seen here: Huey Newton.).  What’s also uniquely intriguing, but never explored, is the drug addiction of a jazz pianist, as more typically the addicts are horn players and lead singers, or both.  The piano is more of a percussive instrument in Bebop jazz, like Thelonious Monk (Jo’s idol in the opening quote), a driving, rhythmic force in simpatico with the drums and bass players, where you’d think they need to be clear-headed and sharp to play some of the more complicated arrangements.  

Surrounded by dysfunction, Jo is the worried daughter that spends much of her youth looking after the interests of her father, trying to maintain control and be the adult in the situation.  While Joe played with jazz legends Lester Young and Charlie Parker, it was more than a decade ago, as we only hear about it in offhanded conversations or in fan photos that decorate Jo’s bedroom walls.  When we see him play, he’s in some anonymous jazz trio in small clubs or off in some dingy bar somewhere playing alone.  By the time Jo is old enough to remember her father, the Bebop era is largely over, where the American disinterest in jazz (and repeated parole violations) drove Joe overseas to Europe.  After several years of repeated drug offenses, his passport is revoked and he’s sent back to America, revelations that are part and parcel with her growing up stage, as a stream of more unpleasant realities begin to creep into her life.  Joe’s life descends into a morass of addiction, where he simply can’t stop himself from using, becoming more gloomy and fatalistic, where by the end of the film each character has a major dramatic moment, as if Jo is revisiting her final moments with each of them, allowing them perhaps to finally just be themselves, naked and unvarnished, and not some embellished memory.  Why couldn’t the rest of the film be like that?  These brief moments suggest a much better film could have been made without the naïve innocence and child adulation that constantly comes in conflict with overtly traumatic subject matter.  While the director attempts to establish a turbulent family relationship, what plays out onscreen is continuously self-destructive and troublesome, leading to dramatic meltdowns and melodramatic overreach instead of real, full-fledged character development.  Chalk this up to inexperience.     

Despite a brief recording career in Europe and a few more sessions in the 70’s, Albany is largely unrecorded in the prime of his life, where a single 1957 LP exists entitled The Right Combination with Wayne Marsh on tenor sax and Bob Whitlock on bass.  The first song we hear in the film is Angel Eyes, where ironically one of the definitive, narcotic-induced renditions of this song Gene Ammons - Angel Eyes - YouTube (8:52) is played by Chicago tenor saxophonist Gene Ammons, another addict who spent much of his life incarcerated for narcotics possession.  Albany is a non-stop smoker throughout, as much a part of the jazz scene as alcohol or heroin, where the low ceilings and poor ventilation in the clubs also increased the health risks.  The film is infused with classic jazz music of the era, like Coleman Hawkins, Thelonious Monk, and Max Roach, with an extended piece played live before an audience by Albany over the closing credits, shot in grainy Super 16mm by Christopher Blauvelt, where the first-time director attempts to capture the atmospheric look of the dingy rooms and smoky clubs, but next to no insight develops here, as the depressive, downbeat mood overwhelms any attempt to reveal something significant, becoming more of an adolescent diary format from a young girl coming-of-age.  Much better films are Bent Hamer’s Factotum (2005), exquisitely shot on 35mm, similarly exploring the seedy world of Los Angeles as it follows a fictionalized world of drunk poet Charles Bukowski, also Philippe Garrel’s I Don’t Hear the Guitar Anymore (J'entends plus la guitare) (1991), an autobiographical film that reveals the ten year romance of the French film director with Velvet Underground singer Nico, much of it spent in the throes of drug addiction and a constant fix, an unglamorous view that is downbeat and utterly sad, where an unsparing confessional tone is mixed with a raw internal dysfunction, with outstanding original music by French jazz pianist Faton Cahen, a piano and a few ascending jazz riffs on a sax, offering an eloquent testament to a narcotic induced haze.  

Clean

CLEAN                       B+                  

France  Canada  Great Britain  (111 mi)  2004  d:  Olivier Assayas

A break-up picture, very much reflective of the personal separation of the director and his ex-wife, leading lady Maggie Cheung, who parted and went separate ways.  This is a character driven film, with a terrific international cast, but not always a seamless feel.  Don McKellar is Canadian, Nick Nolte is American, Maggie Cheung is Chinese but multi-lingual, and the rest of the cast is French, including the likes of Jeanne Balibar, Rémi Martin, and the always superb Béatrice Dalle.  As the film is in English, it occasionally feels somewhat unworldly, yet that is the distinct intention of the film.  There is a marvelous soundtrack, a trademark of Assayas, this one driven by the imagination of Brian Eno, which also includes a stab at singing by Cheung with the recording of the song, “Down in the Light” clean.wmv  YouTube (2:49), very much within her character, hushed, quiet, with very spare music underneath, sounding like the personalized, early music of Nico from the Velvet Underground.  This film could be her biography.

One is reminded of another film that centered around the what-about-me people in the music industry, featuring a dominant lead performance, Frances McDormand in LAUREL CANYON (2002), a film that didn’t live up to the strength of her performance.  While a lot didn’t feel right here, namely any sense of naturalness in the actual sound of the words, yet overall, it was quite intense and emotionally affecting, with bits and pieces that were superb.  There’s an in-your-face feel to the opening segment which lures you right into the muck and mire of the music business, a back-stabbing world of self-centered stars who believe the world revolves only around them.  But the music is hypnotic, as is a live opening act performance in a dream-like Annie Lennox mold, featuring Emily Haines, a Canadian indie phenomenon, the lead singer for Metric singing the song “Dead Disco” Dead Disco - Metric - Clean - YouTube  (4:33).  But things fall apart instantly, leading to a momentary disconnection between a heroin-addicted couple, a fading rock star and his Yoko Ono-like-blame-her-because-she’s-pulling-you-down girl.  There’s a beautiful widescreen expanse where she drives alone at night and sits in her car shooting up facing a lit up giant industrial plant in Hamilton, Ontario spewing its toxic waste into the air 24 hours a day, a metaphor for the effects of her own poison, both internal and external.  When she returns, the rock star has overdosed, his career instantly takes off, accomplishing in death what he could never accomplish in life, while she’s blamed for his death and immediately sent to prison for 6 months.  They have a young son, currently living with his grandparents, Nick Nolte and Martha Henry in Vancouver, and due to the potential added pain of her presence in the boy’s life, she is asked to stay away for a few years, so she flees penniless to Paris.         

Eric Gautier is the cinematographer, and his hustle and bustle street shots in Paris are just filled with energy and life, the camera is never still, it keeps moving, as does Cheung at that time in her life, continually looking for anything to get her life, her career, back on track, with absolutely no success.  This leads to two of the better scenes in the film, as Cheung tries to re-establish old contacts, first shooting pool with Dalle in a packed bar, as Cheung brings her a demo tape she made with another inmate while incarcerated, where the fluidity of motion is completely in balance with her fluctuating world, and the next is a near surreal, out of body experience, as she’s sitting in the waiting room to see Balibar, a cable TV executive where Cheung got her start, and her personal secretary, in a gutty and powerful appearance by Laetitia Spigarelli, starts recounting the story of Cheung’s life, including all the vivid details of an obvious infatuation.  What’s brilliant about this scene is how it creates such an exact picture in our imaginations, and then takes us elsewhere.  Yet the secretary’s bluntness is unforgettable, as is one of her later scenes where we see evidence of the secretary’s sexual domination of her boss.  All of this leaves Cheung out in the cold, where we hear the chilling effects throughout her emotional turmoil in the repeated refrain from Brian Eno’s “An Ending (Ascent)” CLEAN (4:10), heard earlier in the industrial complex scene, a hauntingly spiritual ascension that became mesmerizing to listen to, but Cheung is startlingly and incomprehensibly rescued first by Dalle providing her a room, then by Balibar who pulls some strings to get her a low level sales job in a department store. 

Meanwhile, the family in Vancouver has flown to London for special medical tests, as the grandmother’s health is deteriorating.  Nolte has to come to grips with what to do with the child, as he feels unable to cope with him alone, so against his wife’s desires, as she holds Cheung responsible for her son’s death, a feeling transferred to her grandson, Nolte opens the door a crack and allows Cheung the opportunity to reunite with her son.  Nolte’s feelings are key to this film, as he breaks from his wife’s fervent wishes, and he loves his wife intensely, yet without his belief in forgiveness and the possibility for change, the whole self-absorbed texture of a tortured rock star’s widow might have been different.  As it is, it’s beautifully open-ended, all generated from a marvelous speech by Nolte when Cheung is finally honest with him, bravely transferring for the first time a little bit of family trust to her shoulders, with the little boy looking innocently in their direction, a heartrenderingly pure moment that is without an ounce of overreach.  This allows the first breath of air for Cheung to breathe in the entire film, as she’s been on the run, frantically searching in every which direction, and Nolte actually puts his arm around her shoulder in the most surprising of moments, which finally allows her the chance for redemption.  It’s just a momentary spark of recognition, without which, her life may have been emotionally shattered forever—again, a wonderful reflection of Assayas’s own personal break up with Cheung.