One of the enduring tropes of Sofia Coppola’s body of work is girlhood in palatial settings – the Versailles of Marie Antoinette, the Chateau Marmont of Somewhere and now the Graceland of Priscilla, her biopic (of sorts) of the First Lady of the Elvis Presley myth. Coming on the heels of Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, it’s impossible not to compare the two films, especially since they’re so different in style, sensibility and subject matter. Luhrmann’s film focuses squarely on the singer himself, reserving most of its focus for his rise to fame, and positioning manager Colonel Tom Parker as the most important figure in his life. By contrast, Coppola turns her eye to Priscilla Presley, played here by Cailee Spaeny, and is more interested in Elvis’ star image than his music, which barely appears in her soundscape. Adopting a low-budget naturalism that’s quite striking in contrast to the rest of her own filmography, let alone the flamboyant maximalism of Luhrmann’s vision, Coppola traces a romance in which Elvis was largely in absentia – first, his fleeting visits to Priscilla Beaulieu on the US Air Force Base in Germany where they met; second, his touring during her initial relocation to Graceland to come of age as something between his girlfriend and his ward; and finally, a marriage that he also spent largely on tour, shooting films, or living a double life in Los Angeles. Elvis is thus both present and absent at the same time in Coppola’s vision of the marriage – or perhaps more accurately, present in his absence, in the same way that Jacob Elordi’s enormous social media presence overshadows the comparatively small role that he plays in the film.

To some extent, Coppola seems to be making a point about the way in which Elvis’ celebrity overshadowed Priscilla’s life, allowing him to build a platform for his fame on her silence, suppression and frustration. Yet that makes the film sound more anhedonic than it actually is, more inclined to paint Priscilla as a victim rather than an emblem of the hushed and introverted joy of girlhood love that has been Coppola’s muse ever since The Virgin Suicides. Before Priscilla meets Elvis, he exists in the realm of fantasy, and yet this fantasy only intensifies as their relationship proceeds. On their first date together, they go to a repertory screening of The Maltese Falcon, and as Elvis mouths the words, seeing in the film a prototype for his own pop presence, we’re suddenly reminded that he is closer in time to Bogart to our own era. That creates a sense that Elvis’ moment of coming to visibility, documented so dramatically in Elvis, is beyond the purview of the regular viewer, or regular fan, relegated to a past that remains as mythical to Priscilla herself as it does to the film’s audience. The fact that Elvis and Priscilla both meet in the midst of acute homesickness, away from the creature comforts of America, in a world so drab that it leaches colour from Coppola’s typically extroverted mise-en-scenes, only enhances this feeling that their relationship, from its inception, depends upon a lost object, an irretrievable moment, an epiphany concealed from view, whether it be Elvis’ moment of self-realisation, their shared fantasy of an American homeland, or some vertiginous nexus between the two.

By the time that Elvis has courted Priscilla, and persuaded her parents to permit her to return with him to Graceland, and live with his grandmother until she finishes high school, Coppola has established the central obsession of her film: the impenetrable hush that surrounds Presley, and that only intensifies with proximity to him. It is the hush of the girlhood love that thrives on a kind of blank time that no longer exists – and most of the film consists of Priscilla simply waiting for Elvis to appear, while relying on fetishes and surrogates of his celebrity image, poring over pictures and articles in magazines, from the intimacy of her bedroom, amongst people who can’t or won’t understand her obsession. The dim cinematography evokes days that bleed together, dead durations that can only be parsed by celebrity news, and, beneath it all, a new kind of auratic intimacy to celebrity as it congeals into the objet petit a of a post-WWII girlhood. In Germany, Priscilla never manages to break through this hush, and at Graceland it only intensifies, as she finds herself more alone than ever before, and yet more enmeshed in Elvis’ textures than ever before too, causing her to yearn for his celebrity image more than she ever thought possible. Even when he does intermittently return from his continuous tours, he’s always surrounded by a posse, and gets in the habit of taking a sleeping pill before bed, leaving her the narrowest of windows to give her fantasy corporeal form.

In other words, Priscilla’s marriage to Elvis maintains rather than fulfils inchoate yearnings of girlhood, since the whole point of and condition for her move to Graceland is that the King allows her to remain a girl until she comes of age. With her parents gone but Elvis also absent, Priscilla drifts into a surreal distended girlhood that intensifies further when she does come of age, symbolised by Elvis buying her a car for her graduation but remaining outside to avoid distracting the audience from the ceremony. Finally, she becomes Elvis’ own objet petit a, the fan whose sanctity he has to preserve in perpetual girlhood at Graceland in order to maintain his celebrity ego ideal, turning Graceland itself into a fantasy of girlhood that becomes quieter and emptier as the film proceeds, forcing Priscilla to substitute in for every major domestic fixture, until she is not even permitted to consort at length with the female administrative staff. The opening shot of the film depicts different extremities of her body being integrated into the textures of Graceland, which in turn become prehensile, sentient, laden with affect; a feeling-space that transmutes Priscilla’s yearnings back into mise-en-scene.

For the paradox of Priscilla’s situation is that the closer she gets to Elvis, the more she yearns for him. His reality is always elsewhere – in America when they’re in Germany, in Los Angeles when they’re in Memphis, and on any other part of Graceland except for the room she’s inhabiting when they both happen to be home together. It’s the same celebrity logic that pervades all of Coppola’s films, but especially The Bling Ring, whose teenage burglars only fantasised more about their criminal targets after breaking into their residences. Graceland becomes the departure point for Elvis’ persona, for the fantasy of Elvis, which occludes his music, largely scrubbing it from the score, while also ensuring that Graceland and Priscilla must always be structurally elsewhere for Elvis as well. The moment she becomes pregnant, and symbolically ceases to be a girl, Elvis not only loses interest in her sexually, but finally feels the debilitating weight of his musical and cinematic decline, forcing Priscilla to abdicate Graceland to not only preserve a semblance of self but to leave Elvis’ own fantasies of himself intact, although by this stage she’s become so synonymous with the property’s textures that it’s questionable whether Elvis even notices her absence. Given that Priscilla also discovers everything about Elvis through the media, like his most remote fans, you have to wonder whether she fully believes she’s left him until she hears it on the radio, reads it in the newspaper, or sees it on television.

In its later stages, then, Priscilla plays as a sceptical riff on Coppola’s girlhood muse. When Priscilla arrives at the threshold of Graceland for the first time, the soundtrack dips into Coppola’s New Wave anachronisms, a sure sign that the objet petit a of the hushed girlhood gaze is approaching. But the tone is more muted when Priscilla finally departs, not least because the film ends so abruptly at this point that it as if Coppola’s own fantasy of girlhood, the whole raison d’etre of her filmography, has been radically and irrevocably disturbed. For Priscilla’s penance is to be preserved for perpetuity in precisely the kinds of mise-en-scenes that Coppola has made her own; by ending the film at the very moment Priscilla decides to flee this supposed sanctuary, Coppola signals a break in her own career too, a shift from her classical phase to late work, which at this stage feels as open and emergent as Priscilla must have upon finally returning from Elvis to the world.