Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla”: To Be a Teenage Girl is To Be a Tightly Coiled Spring
To be a teenage girl is to be a tightly coiled spring; to be one in a Sofia Coppola film is to always be performing the role, cat-eye and lashes and all, at all times, to everybody and to no-one, until you can no longer tell yourself from the projection the world makes of you. It’s being engulfed by solitude the way sunlight fills a room. How much of ourselves do we give away to the myths we lead ourselves to believe? Every year we lose more good women to bad marriages than to any lethal disease. To be a teenage girl is to be a tightly-coiled spring, to be a grown woman is to know rage and keep it close to your body and navigate your way through it, just to survive.
Sofia Coppola’s films, I believe, have always sat at the edge of greatness, but they indisputably establish her as an auteur. And in Priscilla, it’s clear she’s well-established with her strengths and at the height of her capabilities. No one does a sun-drenched room quite like Sofia does.
What seems, treacherously, the beginning of a sweet, mid-century all-American love story quickly evolves into a tragedy that we don’t really have proper vocabulary to describe yet, but it’s never heavy-handed. Because this is a Sofia Coppola film, it’s tenderness that paints through the frames, letting the violence seep through quietly instead — like there is a horror film lurking just behind the exterior.
Still, there’s something alluring about a slow-motion tragedy. Coppola paints Priscilla’s life as a little dollhouse of tampered-down, slow-burn terror, taking its time to catch you when you’re looking elsewhere. And then it holds you captive.
Every now and then I have to put on one of miss Coppola’s films like a little therapy session except I get worse afterward instead of better. Thank goodness for the likes of Barbie, where female joy is so visible and so easily accepted as truth. And thank goodness for the likes of Priscilla, that so clearly show the loss and love and rage we all carry.
