Is Priscilla by Sofia Coppola the first masterpiece of 2024?

Retracing the meeting between a teenager, Priscilla ( Cailee Spaeny brilliant, between naivety, fascination, bitterness) and a rock star, 10 years her senior, named Elvis Presley ( Jacob Elordi equally fabulous, magnetic, disturbing), and their relationship, presented enough pitfalls for a less subtle filmmaker than Sofia Coppola to stumble.   Absolutely indecent from its beginnings, their relationship prepared the ground for a predictable variation around the toxic couples. With tact, she distills the poison of coercion, in an extraordinary scenography evoking as much the technicolour melodramas of Douglas Sirk as the elliptical horror films of John Carpenter . The fact that she did not have permission from the Presley family to use her music - but the blessing of the main interested party - allows her to move away from the icon to explore a soul adrift : when he meets Priscilla, his career stagnates, between mediocre songs and terrible films, he is perpetually or almost high, between amphetamines and sleeping pills - which he encourages his partner to consume. In no way does Sofia Coppola make this an excuse for her behavior. Presley plays his wife as an inanimate object: dressed, styled, accessorised, in the same way he has pistols customised to match his dresses, she is for him only a disembodied being, without desire or aspiration of her own. …Lost in the immense Graceland residence, she wanders in a palace where all forms of life are absent. Few filmmakers film as well as the director the birth and death of emotions , their subtle movements, from Virgin Suicides to Priscilla via Lost in Translation , the solitude that grips the heart. She captures the tremors of the senses and feelings with the infinite delicacy of a horticulturist. Bathed in a sublime light evoking the photographs of Joel Meyerowitz, the slow tilt of their marriage towards the abyss of Presley's psychoses is all the more chilling, petrifying even to its central character, as if swaddled in her clothes, immured in her haunted house bedroom and living rooms, foreign to the bubbling atmosphere that surrounds her husband - present, but invisible. Beneath the plastic sumptuousness, the venom circulating in the veins of the film is all the more deadly. Carried by a magnificent, and discreet, music signed by Phoenix , the film multiplies the possible levels of readings : the toxicity of this relationship, certainly, but also, and above all, in our eyes, the fear - of being torn from childhood, sucked into a world that we did not imagine was so terrifying, and the courage to break away from it, to emancipate ourselves, to flee to live for good, according to our own rules.  

A film by Sofia Coppola. With Cailee Spaeny, Jacob Elordi, Ari Cohen and Jorja Cadence. In theaters.