Set in 1961 and based on the journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir, the film stars Carey Mulligan as an English sixteen-year-old named Jenny who, impatient to escape the routine of youth-orchestra rehearsals and Latin exams, peppers her speech with French phrases and holds forth on Camus. This is the irony that the title of the 2009 movie “An Education” winks at. Class becomes an exasperating distraction. (“She’s much more mature than her age,” he later tells her father.) Priscilla is swept up into a double life: kissing Elvis by night, walking high-school hallways by day, ablaze with the memory. Is she a junior in high school, he asks, or a senior? “Ninth,” she replies, with disarming clumsiness-she’s a ninth grader. There, introductory small talk concerns her age. When Elvis meets Priscilla, he is serving in the Army at a West German base where Priscilla’s father is also stationed their courtship begins with an invitation to a party at Elvis’s house. Jacob Elordi, Coppola’s Elvis, is six feet five, and he towers over her in a comically literal manifestation of their relative stature. Cailee Spaeny, who plays Priscilla with guileless clarity, is in her twenties but has the soft, unformed features of an adolescent. Who but a child would accept the strictures of life with Elvis? Wearing the colors he chooses, coming and going as he demands, confined to the chaperoned solitude of a pet-anyone older, with a life of her own, wouldn’t put up with it. Priscilla’s age, the movie makes clear, is in no way incidental to the romance: it is the whole thing, the necessary counterweight to Elvis’s stardom. It’s a gently unsettling reminder of how often the “little girls” on the periphery of pop music-from Jerry Lee Lewis’s thirteen-year-old wife to the “baby groupies” of the nineteen-seventies Sunset Strip-have been actual little girls. “Venus, if you will / Please send a little girl for me to thrill,” Frankie Avalon warbles on the soundtrack. The Priscilla we meet at the movie’s beginning is sipping a Coke in a diner, her ponytail weightlessly buoyant. By the time her divorce from Elvis was finalized in 1973, Priscilla was twenty-eight years old, and she’d been in his orbit half her life. The story begins with a man approaching fourteen-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu, seeking company for his friend Elvis Presley. These are among the questions that Sofia Coppola takes up in “Priscilla,” an adaptation of Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir, “ Elvis and Me,” which follows the heroine’s journey into and out of Graceland. What is the experience of being young and desired for being young? How does it feel to walk around in the schoolgirl’s pleated skirt? The allure of female youth is so culturally ubiquitous that a filmmaker’s examining it from the inside out can be a defamiliarizing exercise. Mariel Hemingway might give a formidable performance as Tracy, the seventeen-year-old Dalton student Woody Allen’s character romances in “Manhattan,” but the film is not especially interested in what it might be like to be a seventeen-year-old dating a middle-aged man. (Does anyone think of herself as “a schoolgirl,” or does the phrase itself leer?) As an object of desire, the schoolgirl is familiar enough-as a subject in her own right, less so. On TikTok, teen-age girls invent trends that the world rushes to follow in “Barbie,” a teen-age girl serves as the voice of wised-up skepticism.īut “the schoolgirl” conjures, in particular, the teen girl as the object of older male interest. Taylor Swift began as a troubadour of high-school’s emotional tumult-she was eighteen when she released a song about freshman year called “Fifteen”-and her billionaire status today is a testament to the power of fangirls. Adolescent tastes and interests have come in for critical reappraisal, or at least for grudging appreciation as market forces. In the long years since “. . . Baby One More Time,” teen girlhood has enjoyed a kind of cultural ascendancy. With the release of her memoir last month, Spears joins a roll call of pop-culture figures with narratives to reclaim-and perhaps the schoolgirl, too, merits a moment of reconsideration. It was a persona Spears wore like a polyester Halloween costume throughout her first flush of fame-from her pigtails and kneesocks in the video for “. . . Baby One More Time” to her pushup bra and curly phone cord on the cover of Rolling Stone. When Britney Jean Spears was sixteen years old, she put on a pleated skirt and channelled an archetype: the schoolgirl, underage temptress.
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