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'Priscilla' a dreamy but stultifying portrait of an American princess

Jacob Elordi as Elvis, right, and Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla star in a scene from "Priscilla." A24 via AP

There’s a scene in the middle of “Priscilla,” Sofia Coppola’s biopic of Priscilla Presley, which contains a surreal detail that had to have been at least one of Coppola’s sparks of inspiration. Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny), heavily pregnant, has gone into labor. As her husband, the King of Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi) rushes around the house, raising a commotion, Priscilla reaches for her false eyelashes, carefully putting them on before rushing to the hospital in her signature look of black winged eyeliner and a giant black beehive. She will emerge later with every hair and lash intact, clutching their newborn daughter, Lisa Marie.

The whole story lives inside this moment of the false eyelashes applied before delivering a baby, and from this bud blooms Coppola’s dreamy but stultifying portrait of an American princess trapped in an iconic palace. In the same way that she captured teen queen Marie Antoinette in her 2006 film of the same name, Coppola turns her attention toward American icons in “Priscilla,” adapting Presley’s 1985 memoir, “Elvis and Me,” imagining the reality of a young girl wed to the King.

The hair is almost as big as the French queen’s powdered ‘dos, but Priscilla’s is dyed pitch black, “to bring out her eyes,” as Elvis instructs, and it of course matches his own raven locks. In an opening sequence, Priscilla’s toes pad across plush pink carpet, liquid liner swiped onto her lids, nails polished. The film is about her making — which is to say her image — as she is plucked from a diner at an American military base in Germany as a shy 14-year-old, then courted, groomed, shipped off, dressed, teased and painted into rock royalty, while kept behind glass like a doll, trotted out for photo ops.

Coppola has obviously long been interested in this kind of story, of the teenage girls who were put on pedestals and then pilloried, whose pictures are more famous than their personalities. But “Priscilla” floats on the surface, not quite delving into the interiority of its subject, though Spaeny delivers a unique and challenging performance, one that is quiet, subtle and all in the eyes.

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