The Alternate Version: Priscilla

PRISCILLA (EUA, 2024)

Original title:
Priscilla

Filming date:

October 24 - December 2022

Release date:

October 27, 2023 (Worldwide)

Running time:

113min

Production company:

The Apartment Pictures

American Zoetrope

A24

Sony Pictures

Stage 6 Films

Budget:

US$ 20 million

Box office:

US$ 21 million (WORLDWIDE, by December 25, 2023)

Main cast:

Cailee Spaeny

Jacob Elordi
Dagmara Domińczyk

Raine Monroe Boland

Emily Mitchell

Jorja Cadence

Rodrigo Fernandez-Stoll

Luke Humphrey

Soundtrack:

"Priscilla" (CD / Double CD / Digital)
(November 2, 2023)

Priscilla is the first film to deal with the life of Priscilla Ann Beaulieu, ex-wife of the King of Rock Elvis Presley, before and during her marriage to the singer.

Based slightly on the book "Elvis & Me", released by Priscilla in 1988 and turned into a television film in the same year, the film tells its story modifying some moments to try to generate sympathy for Elvis' ex-wife. The script, written by writer Sandra Harmon and director Sofia Coppola with assistance from Priscilla Beaulieu herself, transforms Elvis, in the words of Lisa Marie Presley - with which we agree - into "a predator and manipulator" in a "vengeful and contemptuous" film.

The production was announced shortly after the financial success of "ELVIS", the biopic of the singer directed by Baz Luhrmann in 2022, and the project quickly got off the ground after Priscilla revealed to the media that she would like to clarify some things seen in Luhrmann's film about her.

Knowing of the changes in the stories told by Priscilla in "Elvis & Me" and how this would negatively affect Elvis' image, Lisa Marie Presley and EPE were quick to deny any help for Coppola's production, including vetoing the use of images, voice or songs by the singer. Lisa Marie even went further and sent emails to Sofia Coppola with fierce criticism of the script and an appeal for her not to film the project.

Sofia Coppola, daughter of acclaimed director Francis Ford Coppola and cousin of actor Nicolas Cage (whose real name is Nicolas Coppola), has always been known for her impactful productions, but it seems that in "Priscilla", probably at her own request, the director went overboard in feminism and trying to pass everything off as machismo or simply disdain. Furthermore, although it is a film that promised to bring the real story of Elvis Presley and Priscilla Beaulieu, some scenes and events were completely invented, inserted in contexts other than the real ones or distorted to favor a narrative.

When released worldwide on October 27, 2023, the film had low acceptance in theaters, failing to even recover its budget of US$20 million, a number that was only reached two months later. As of December 25, 2023, the film has grossed just US$21 million and is considered a box office failure.

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Below we list some errors and make observations about our experience with the film, given the point of view that facts should not be modified to please parties or create commercial controversy.

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CONTAINS SPOILERS!

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Please skip to the "soundtrack" section if you haven't seen the film yet

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"Do you like Elvis Presley?" Married officer Terry A. West enters a restaurant at an American air base in Germany in 1959 and asks 14-year-old Priscilla if she would like to meet the King of Rock. She, without blinking, accepts as long as she can ask her parents for permission first. And it is here, in the fourth minute of the film, that we find the first error.

In fact, Priscilla had a boyfriend at the time, a soldier named Currie Grant. Currie said several times that it was Priscilla who asked him to introduce her to Elvis in exchange for a rather salacious reward, until he was sued by her as soon as he threatened to release intimate photos of her in 1959 to prove their relationship. There were several trials over the case, with Priscilla accusing Grant of slander and attempted defamation, in addition to stating that such photos did not exist, but the most curious thing is that, in the end, Grant received US$10,000 and was ordered to return the photos she said didn't exist.

As soon as Priscilla arrives at Elvis's house in Bad Nauheim, we notice that the director tried to establish Elvis as a predator in the first words exchanged with the young woman. And this is reinforced by the song he plays on the piano right after, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On", a hit by Jerry Lee Lewis, who married his own 13-year-old cousin. In the sequence we also find Priscilla feeling pressured to see Elvis again, as if he was forcing her to attend yet another party - and there was no shortage of girls for Elvis, if that was all he wanted - and the singer maliciously inviting her to be alone with him.

Priscilla fights with her parents when they are concerned about the fact that she spends too much time with Elvis and doesn't sleep well. In addition to it being a lie that her parents worried so much, since she spent nights on end with the singer, the attempt to say that she no longer slept because she was already picking up Elvis' habits is sick and untrue. As is the way in which the King of Rock is presented again as a predator when he tells Priscilla's parents that he likes her because she is "young, but more mature than her age". To reinforce this negative image, we still see him giving her expensive gifts as if he was trying to impress or buy her.

After Elvis returns to the US in March 1960, the film quickly skips the next three years. Priscilla reads about the singer and his affairs in gossip magazines and we are forced to believe - or pretend to believe - that she spent this period alone, bitter and waiting for a reunion with her greatest love of all.

Here there is another discrepancy: instead of what we see, the girl met Elvis during this period. Even worse is that the release of "G.I. Blues" was moved to 1962, as well as the rumor of him dating Nancy Sinatra, and Priscilla's mother trying to convince her to forget him, when in fact there was a lot of interest behind the relationship.

When Elvis tells Priscilla that he will take her to live with him at Graceland, we again feel a je ne sais quoi of manipulation as the girl visually expresses a dissatisfaction that never existed. In fact, there was a plan on Priscilla's part for Elvis to take her to his mansion as soon as possible. Once there, she feels sexually rejected for the first time by the singer, sending us the message that, in addition to being predatory and manipulative, he might also only be interested in sex if she was younger.

We then see Priscilla wake up two days after taking a pill offered by Elvis and a sequence in Las Vegas that suggests that he introduced her to everything that was wrong: drugs, drinks, gambling and general partying. There is a deification of her pure and sweet figure, while the direction acts in the opposite way in the singer's actions, placing him as a "devil in disguise".

With 35 minutes of this festival of horrors, we had to stop this review. The courage to continue returned more than a day later and in a weak form.

After a few months with Elvis at Graceland, Priscilla is reluctant to return to live with her parents in Germany. Another point that never actually occurred becomes the basis for Priscilla's stepfather to accept Elvis' terms and agree for the girl to move in with him permanently. History tells something much darker: the singer was threatened by the parents of the "innocent girl" and he, afraid of negative repercussions and probably influenced by Parker, gave in. Elvis himself would later say that he had been threatened if he didn't take her under his roof.

As soon as she settles into Graceland, Priscilla starts to feel alone and realize that she is in a place where nothing belongs to her, especially with Elvis always filming in Hollywood. Of course, this is another fictional part of the plot, since if there was one thing Graceland was famous for, it was the fact that it was always packed with people. Seeing Dee scolding the girl for being in the property's courtyard is highly unrealistic and very insulting to her memory.

The insults to Elvis' charisma and the attempt to cast him as a manipulator continue when he takes Priscilla shopping for new clothes. She wants to buy a boring brown dress and all it takes is for Elvis to say that he doesn't like the model and that he wants her to wear other things, besides dying her hair black, for Sofia Coppola to impose a sense of controlling machismo on the scene. We know that the singer has always been very protective of the things and people he loved most, but this borders on ridiculous.

We then return to the problem of Elvis' prescription drugs. And here the director simply shows Priscilla taking antidepressants as if they were gummy bears to instill in the mind of the ill-informed that her clear addiction was something caused by Elvis, who never offered his medications to others. In fact, JD Sumner has said several times that "the heavy drugs that were used on tour were bought by the Mafia boys with fake Elvis signatures, but Elvis never used them and didn't know about them."

After collecting weapons as if Elvis were an outlaw who forced her to do so, Priscilla feels pressured again to change her style because he comments that her horrible dress, by the way, doesn't look good on her. She also starts to take antidepressants before classes and, because she is doing poorly in her studies, buys a classmate with the promise of taking her to an Elvis party. And who is to blame, if not the person who doesn't control themselves with medication that wasn't offered to them and cheats on a test? Certainly not Elvis.

Elvis gives her a car, buys her clothes, agrees not to go to her graduation so as not to turn the spotlight on him, but nothing is ever good for Priscilla - which, "obviously", must be his fault, according to Coppola. At least the director and writers decided to leave a snippet of truth here, when she and Elvis make intimate home movies and photos (Would Currie Grant be telling the truth, then?). Elvis then, for no reason at all, hits Priscilla because of a joke.

As this was too much invention for us, we stopped the review again. The movie was barely over an hour and we still had another 50 minutes to go. The solution was to give our intellect another day off. In fact, editing this comment now, after finishing our evaluation, we realized that reviewing this film took us three times as long as any other film had already taken because we had to stop from time to time because we didn't believe what we were seeing.

On our fourth day of review, we return to Elvis at Graceland apologizing for what happened and begging Priscilla to open the bathroom door and come out. We would like to know what he says, but the voice that the actor gave to the King of Rock is so slurred and exaggerated - as if he had a potato in his mouth - that it is impossible to distinguish words. This isn't something that's only noticed at that moment, it's throughout the film!

We see an extremely treacherous and aggressive Elvis in the next few minutes. Priscilla asks about Ann-Margret and he verbally attacks her; when asking about messages exchanged between them, she again receives the singer's aggression. He even throws a chair at her! There is a gathering of events here that do not match reality at all. Elvis was indeed temperamental, but never to this extent in the part of the story we are supposedly seeing - the mid-1960s. And even if he later had ill-considered reactions, there was never any report of physical aggression by any of his other girlfriends.

We reach 1967 and Elvis and Priscilla get married. The scene shows love and joy, but we know that Elvis had another opinion about what really happened on that May Day. He would repeat for the rest of his life that he was threatened, coerced, and forced into marriage; that he had no interest in being a married man at that point in his life. According to him, it was all just a coup orchestrated by the Colonel, Priscilla and her parents. By divine grace, the only good thing about it all was the birth of Elvis' only love after his mother: Lisa Marie.

As several Memphis Mafia sources tell it, shortly after Lisa's birth on February 1, 1968, Priscilla was seen taking a shower with her karate instructor, Mike Stone. Of course, that's twisted here, casting Elvis as the villain who calls for a break from the relationship while Priscilla is still pregnant. The relationship with Stone, obviously, is not even commented on in the film, so as not to destroy the narrative of a woman victim of an extremely sexist man.

After briefly seeing the recording for the '68 Comeback Special, we jump in time to 1970 with Elvis performing at his "Summer Festival". The production makes it clear that, at this point in the story, Elvis no longer had any interest in Priscilla, another lie that we are forced to swallow. There was tension, we admit, but the consensus was to try to fix whatever was necessary. Mike Stone is only shown here to hide the relationship that had lasted two years.

We reach 1972 and the end of the film. Priscilla announces that she is leaving and gives no apparent reason, although in the book she mentions "drug abuse" and in reality we know that her betrayals with Mike Stone could no longer be hidden.

What we also know is that she decided to use dates that would destroy Elvis to announce everything: on December 24, 1971, she tells him that the marriage is over; on January 26, 1972, minutes before the start of the first show of that year, she informs him that she is leaving. Everything planned to generate the highest level of stress and suffering possible.

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SOUNDTRACK

To promote the film, director Sofia Coppola hired her husband's band, Phoenix, to compose the soundtrack. Few excerpts of songs are from other artists and the only one that appears complete is the original 1973 version of "I Will Always Love You", by Dolly Parton.

The soundtrack was released on November 2, 2023 on all digital platforms and on a double CD by the labels ABKO Records and A24 Music. Like the film, the album failed to sell.