Since her first two feature films “The Virgin Suicides” (1999) and “Lost in Translation” (2003), Sofia Coppola has consistently adhered on her artistic territory. Her subsequent notable works such as “Marie Antoinette” (2006), “Somewhere” (2010), and “The Beguiled” (2017) are a sort of acquired tasted, but they leave an indelible sense of isolation and wandering on us via their distinctive mood and texture, and I admire these interesting movies even though feeling rather distant to them.

In case of “Priscilla”, which is based on the memoir book “Elvis and Me” by Priscilla Presley and Sandra Harmon, Coppola sticks to her own stylistic methods as much as Baz Luhrmann did in “Elvis” (2022). The movie is as thin and superficial as “Elvis” in terms of story and character, but, in contrast to all those bells and whistles in Luhmann’s movie, it is calm and detached as dryly observing the uncomfortable aspects of Presley and her famous musician husband’s romance. Not so surprisingly, Coppola mostly focuses on Presley’s isolated wandering under her husband’s control, and you will appreciate that if you are familiar with Coppola’s previous works.

The early part of the film is about how Presley, played by Caillee Spaeny, happened to encounter Elvis (Jacob Elordi) in Hamburg, Germany in 1959. During that time, Presley was a 14-year-old girl who was the daughter of an officer in the US military base in Hamburg, and Elvis was one of the young soldiers in the base. After she encounters Elvis via a soldier friend of his at another evening party held in his residence, Elvis comes to show more interest in her, and she does not mind this at all because, well, he is Elvis.

Of course, Presley’s parents, played by Ari Cohen and Dagmara Domińczyk, are not so pleased about this. Although Elvis personally promises to them that he will not do anything bad to their daughter, they cannot help but worry because, after all, there is a considerable age gap between their daughter and Elvis, and they are all the more concerned as watching their daughter becoming more serious about her ongoing romantic relationship with Elvis.

And it turns out that Elvis is also serious about their relationship. When he eventually goes back to US, Presley is naturally saddened by their separation, but, what do you know, Elvis eventually invites her and her parents to his big residence in Memphis, Tennessee a few years later. After having a fun time along with him in Las Vegas, Nevada, Presley becomes more attached to Elvis, and she eventually begins to live with him after getting the reluctant permission from her parents.

Around that point, the mood becomes creepier as expected. As promised to her parents, Presley, who is incidentally not married to Elvis yet, continues her study at a local Catholic school for girls, and she surely draws a lot of attention from many other students. When she is not in the school, she is mostly stuck inside Elvis’ big residence without many things to do, and Elvis is frequently absent due to another concert tour or another movie to shoot in Hollywood.

While watching Presley constantly insulated from the outside world, you can clearly discern what attracted Coppola from the beginning. Just like the heroine of “Marie Antoinette”, Presley is a young, innocent, and confused girl thrown into an isolated environment of affluence which constantly grooms and limits her under its control, and the movie deliberately sticks to her limited viewpoint from the beginning to the end. Although we sometimes hear and observe a bit about whatever is happening beyond her viewpoint, the movie never delves much into that, and we come to sense more of the sense of isolation around her as she struggles to settle and define herself in her alien new world.

In the end, there eventually comes a sort of maturation process shortly after Presley marries her husband in 1967, but that is mostly out of Coppola’s main interest, so this part feels as perfunctory as the finale of “Marie Antoinette”. We simply get a series of episodic moments of more disappointment and disillusion for her, and then there finally comes an inevitable point where she decides that enough is enough.

Spaeny’s good performance, which won the Best Actress award when the movie was shown at the Venice International Film Festival in last year, is pitch-perfect to the overall tone of the movie. While mostly looking subdued on the surface, Spaeny palpably conveys to us her character’s growing pain and confusion along the story, and she also deftly handles a number of subtle moments of character development. Opposite to Spaeny, Jacob Elordi, who recently appeared in Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn” (2023), often towers over his co-star as required without trying too much on Elvis impersonation (The movie understandably sidesteps the need to use those numerous songs performed by Elvis, by the way), and that is the main point of his rather distant acting.

Overall, “Priscilla” requires some patience because of its slow story pacing and detached atmosphere, but it is still another interesting work from Coppola. Although I am not totally enthusiastic, it feels to me like a tranquil counterpoint to “Elvis” in addition to being a bit better in comparison, and maybe they will make a nice double feature show for me someday.