Sofia Coppola’s intimate portrait of the romance, marriage and breakup of Priscilla and Elvis Presley is one of the top offerings of this year’s festival. Read reviews of this and other highlights.
The 61st New York Film Festival, presenting more than 100 films from 45 countries, continues this week at venues in Lincoln Center and throughout New York City, with many of the premieres opening soon in theaters around the country or streaming online.
Reviews of some of this week’s highlights are featured below. [Previous reviews were published in .]
The festival concludes October 15.
“Priscilla” (North American Premiere)
The legend of Elvis is pretty well-trod territory (especially after last year’s gaudy Baz Luhrmann biopic starring Austin Butler), but Sofia Coppola’s intimate new film examines it from the point of view of Priscilla Beaulieu, an Air Force brat from Texas living in West Germany who, at age 14, was invited to a party to meet the biggest music sensation in the world, Elvis Presley.
The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, ten years her senior and smitten, briefly courted the girl – Fourteen!?! – and would, three years later, invite her to the States (promising she would be chaperoned, of course). But even if he was a gentleman, he did take her to Vegas without telling her parents. And then there were the pills.
From the vantage point of a child, it was a fairy tale, one that would stretch from romance, marriage and a kitsch-filled house in Memphis, to outbursts of anger, abuse and infidelity on the part of a partner who happened to be both a rock icon-movie star and an artist struggling to recapture a fickle audience. And it was not a fairy tale that ended happily.
Cailee Spaeny, who portrays Priscilla through an incredible arc from cloistered child to determined wife, mother and, finally, determined escapee, all the while slowly taking the measure of Elvis’ seductive powers and her own independence, won best actress at the Venice Film Festival for her rich performance. Jacob Elordi is remarkable as the musician whose dissatisfaction and self-loathing is turned onto his wife.
Coppola, whose Oscar-winning “Lost in Translation” likewise showed the struggles of a woman trapped within a bubble, keeps the focus almost entirely on Priscilla throughout. It is notable that, perhaps in hewing to the point of view of her protagonist, there are no Elvis songs in the film. They’re not missed; Priscilla’s voice is the music that’s needed. 113 minutes. Screens October 8, 15. An A24 release. Opens in theaters November 3.
“The Pigeon Tunnel”
Novelist David Cornwell, better known by his penname John Le Carré, was a master of conjuring the dark world of espionage and the corrupted psychologies and dubious morals of many who inhabit it. An international sensation with the 1963 publication of “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold,” he continued with such works as “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” “A Perfect Spy,” “The Little Drummer Girl” and “The Constant Gardener” – masterful depictions of how geopolitics can succeed or fail based on the sometimes inopportune allegiances of small operatives caught in the gears of a flawed intelligence apparatus.
A profoundly private man (fitting for his genre), Cornwell rarely gave interviews in the years before his death in December 2020. But in 2016 he published the memoir “The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life.” After, he consented to on-camera questioning by documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (“The Thin Blue Line,” the Oscar-winning “The Fog of War”), in which Cornwell’s melancholic outlook is occasionally pierced by his caustic wit. He deflects questions about his marital life and later years, but he does speak in great depth and sorrow about the scars left on him by his father Ronnie (a con man and “crisis addict” who kept the family sprinting ahead of his many debts) and his mother Olive (who was so fed up with her life that she walked out on her husband and two sons when David was four years old).
