DOLL'S HOUSE.

It is always a matter of cages in Coppola's cinema, especially of gilded cages that actually conceal not inconsiderable pitfalls, mansions or hotel rooms that become claustrophobic mental spaces. The home of the young virgin suicides, Versailles in "Marie Antoinette," the girls' boarding school that houses the young virgin murderers in "Deception." It is women who are imprisoned in such places. They are sacrificial victims of their family unit, of social conventions, of the males with whom they have decided to live. In "Priscilla," the protagonist finds herself very young inside Graceland, the pharaonic mansion of Elvis Presley. Coppola reasons about patriarchy is about female malleability, women who, as in Priscilla's case, are reduced to dolls almost incapable of intellect; male narcissism that annihilates, the inability of the "weaker sex" to rebel in the name of absolute, fairy-tale love.

"Priscilla" is the mournful counterpoint to Baz Luhrmann's "Elvis." In the latter, the story focuses on the king of rock and his manager, and Luhrmann's direction is, as always, baroque is overloaded; instead, Sofia lowers the tone, creates micro sequences introduced by romantic pieces of music, total fields abound so as to relate the characters to props, furnishings and landscapes. The actors play in subtraction, no passion or pain, uncertainty or psychosis shines through from their body language, yet in the love story between Elvis and Priscilla there was plenty of pain, power plays and mental disorders. Sofia Coppola fails to set the tone of her film, to give it a powerful if chilling cinematic dimension, her film is mournful, with few tears, there is ineffective pain in the characterization of the characters. The incendiary source material is restrained in the name of anonymous, bloodless choices. And to think that in the film we have a planetary star suffering from a sampler of psychic disorders, a mansion isolated from the rest of the world, a 14-year-old girl alone, in love and betrayed, a couple's relationship based on overpowering...ingredients that in Pablo Larraín's hands would have created a mind-bending work.

The choice of the main actors is happy only from the point of view of their physicality: Elardi, over six feet tall, towers over the petite Spaeny, a functional choice for the portrayal of a female figure crushed by a man. The path of independence that leads the protagonist to emancipate herself from Elvis is described too abruptly, without any dramatic crescendo.

Crazy soundtrack.

15-Jan-2024 by Ema