Elvis is, for once, behind the scenes. It is Priscilla Presley, with her big hair and loose eyelashes, who is the most interesting to filmmaker Sofia Coppola. In “Priscilla” she tells the story of Priscilla, played by Cailee Spaeny. The plot stretches from when she meets the already legendary Elvis Presley in 1959, through marriage and childbirth and up to the divorce in 1973. This weekend “Priscilla” comes to Norwegian cinemas. WORLD FAMOUS: Priscilla Presley became famous all over the world when she married Elvis Presley. Here played by Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi in “Priscilla”. Two of the women who were closest to Elvis have reacted very differently to the film. “That’s how I felt,” says Priscilla herself. The film is based on her autobiography from 1985. But Elvis’ daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, who died almost a year ago, tried to stop “Priscilla” before the recording had begun. She sent an email to Coppola calling the script “despicable and vindictive”. What she wants, she wrote, is to protect her mother. “I worry that she doesn’t understand the intentions behind this film or the consequences it will have.” What is the reason that mother and daughter react so differently? First and foremost, it has to do with the fact that Priscilla was fourteen when she met Elvis Presley, who was ten years older, on a military base in Germany. She herself claims that the couple never had sex until after they got married, when she was 21. But she was a courtesan from the start. APPARENT IDYLLISM: Elvis and Priscilla Presley pose with their daughter Lisa Marie in 1968. A few years later, the marriage was history. Photo: AP This has caused film critics to write about the discomfort of witnessing “grooming”, a process in which a grown man pushes a very young girl in the direction of an erotic relationship. Priscilla Presley insists it is a romantic tale, a love story. Lisa Marie believed that her father comes across as manipulative. The debate has led to interesting questions being asked about how a story is perceived differently when the norms change. The fact that a 24-year-old man asked a fourteen-year-old on a date raised eyebrows in 1959. Today it would be outright condemned. FURIOUS: Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis and Priscilla Presley’s only child, was provoked by the script of “Priscilla”. She died before the film was completed. Photo: Reuters Those involved, or those who are still alive, can say anything about how this was experienced then and there. But the facts of the case speak for themselves. In that sense, Lisa Marie Presley’s complaint was strange. Numbers speak well, and it is they who make her parents’ story controversial now, more than the portrayal. Sofia Coppola herself says that it is the audience themselves that must find out what they think of Elvis and Priscilla. In this sense, she remains faithful to her own philosophy as a filmmaker. Coppola has always been deeply interested in the lives of young girls, in their little world, the one full of barrettes and nail polish and diaries with round handwriting. She is concerned with their longings, with the desire, loneliness and death drive that can throb on the underside of a pink cardigan. Which they are not always able to put into words. When Priscilla doesn’t condemn Elvis, neither does Coppola. She is not lecturing towards her own main character. But there is something overriding about her Elvis, played by the towering Jacob Elordi from “Euphoria”. PREMIERE: Sofia Coppola and Priscilla Presley presented “Priscilla” during the Venice Film Festival together with the main actors Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi. Spaeny won the award for Best Actress for the lead role. Photo: AP He does not come across as malicious, but as extremely needy. He has buddies and poorly hidden affairs, but expects Priscilla to be available at home at Graceland at all times. He dictates how she should dress and behave. Priscilla also wrote about this in her memoirs. The film about her is a film about living close to an all-consuming figure, and gradually beginning to think that there is a life outside the other’s magnetic field. Priscilla is an unfinished girl, devoid of life experience, when Elvis enters her life and takes it over. Her story becomes a story of breaking out. About imagining a life where she is not defined by her husband, whether he is near or far, in a good or bad mood. VICTORIOUS: Riley Keough, Elvis’ and Priscilla’s granddaughter, now controls the foundation that looks after the legacy of Elvis Presley. Keough is an actor and can currently be seen in ‘Daisy Jones & The Six’. Photo: AP This is probably what also bothered Lisa Marie Presley. It is part of the story that she has had a difficult relationship with her mother. The legacy of Elvis Presley was organized into a foundation, which Lisa Marie, his only child, took over when she turned 25. Priscilla and her business manager helped manage the foundation, but in 2016 Lisa Marie wrote them out of her own will and replaced them with their own adult children. After her son, Benjamin, took his own life, it was Riley Keough, Elvis’ granddaughter, who was left as sole heir. After Lisa Marie’s death, there was a legal dispute between Priscilla and Riley, in which Riley eventually won control of the foundation in return for paying her grandmother a substantial sum of money. But Priscilla and Lisa Marie had obviously disagreed about how the legacy of Elvis Presley should be managed. MEGA STAR: Elvis Presley in a scene from “Jailhouse Rock” from 1957. He was a superstar when he met fourteen-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu two years later. Photo: AP Lisa Marie wrote to Sofia Coppola that if the film was made, she would have to go public, not only against the filmmaker, but also against her own mother. She had another story to tell about him. But “Priscilla” is not about who Elvis was to his daughter, or who he was to the audience that loved him. It is solely about who he was to Priscilla. When someone has reached the iconic status of Elvis Presley, questions about who he “really” was become more and more difficult to answer. Elvis was many different things to many different people, he and his music have different meanings depending on where you stand. Here he gets the unfamiliar role of a crowbar, as a man who finally made Priscilla Presley find herself, somewhere else. STRONGLY SUBJECTIVE: It is Priscilla’s version, no one else’s, that is told in “Priscilla”. Photo: Sabrina Lantos One side of the case is easy to forget in all the fuss. It is that Elvis and Priscilla, although they were world famous, were also a very ordinary couple who met, married, and broke up. There will naturally be disagreement about the accounts of what happened, and why. “Priscilla” tells one party’s version. It is worth taking in, but it is not conclusive. After all, it is among the rarities that divorced spouses tell the same story. Ask any couples therapist.
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The film divides the women in Elvis’ life – Ytring
