Sofia Coppola has long excelled in externalising a specific type of girlhood angst in a way that detractors of her work have called superficial. This very pretty type of suffocation may be a part of the purpose – we regularly relish within the very things which will trap us in the long run – and it is vitally much the thesis of her latest film, Priscilla. An elliptical, poetic exploration borrowing from the memoirs of Priscilla Beaulieu Presley (Elvis and Me) and with the 60s icon as an exec producer, the film is less a conventional biopic and more the portrait of a wierd, seductive, and ultimately poisonous marriage from starting to finish.

And despite being about one of the crucial recognisable couples of the era, Priscilla’s rhythms feel curiously identifiable across much of womanhood. It’s the stuff of popular culture legend, but scratch the surface with one long pointed fingernail and it’s a story that’s frighteningly familiar: a handsome, charismatic man; a woman in love; an age gap and an influence differential; an identity melding into another person’s with the unfurling, warm, sensual power of Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Crimson and Clover” playing within the background.

Starring a remarkable Cailee Spaeny, whose performance must span the ages of 14 to 30 within the film, the film begins with the pair’s meeting – when Priscilla is a teen virgin in saddle shoes sipping milkshakes in a West German diner – in an American army base where her father is high-ranking. Elvis Presley, the controversial hip-shaking King of Rock’n’Roll, was 24 when he met her. Presley, played here by Jacob Elordi, is smartly forged as a tall, handsome drink of water who towers over his teenage quarry each physically and psychologically.

From the coolly isolated luxury hotels of Tokyo to the literal palace of Versailles, Coppola’s cinematic worlds are sometimes gilded cages, together with her female protagonists suspended in adolescence in perpetuity, a method or one other. Be that the frozen-in-aspic deaths of The Virgin Suicides or the lifetime of the teenager queen of France, betrothed and separated from her entire family in Marie Antoinette, it’s a transparent theme. Coppola herself has said in interviews that Priscilla and Marie Antoinette share something just like the same DNA (what’s Graceland if not the American Versailles, a grandiose monument to a king, where their women wander the halls bereft of purpose?).

In some respects, you may say that the themes and concepts of a movie like Coppola’s latest are ones which were in her oeuvre for years. If detractors have sometimes found the director’s work distancing, more excited by aesthetics than interiority, Priscilla each does little to disprove them and likewise directly inverts that. Priscilla is a confection that knows its one from the opening beat, focusing because it does in a knowing and enjoyable montage of slipper-pink nail polish and cutesy knick-knacks and inky black cat-eye liner. The film knows it’s a confection because Priscilla Beaulieu Presley knows she is, too. If she doesn’t create this prettified, grown-up self for public consumption – and more directly, for her older lover’s consumption – she might crack open like a meringue and learn there’s nothing inside.

The film, which is bookended essentially by Priscilla’s entrance and eventually her departure from Graceland, is in some respects Coppola’s most complete statement on the dissociative qualities of her female characters. These items are linked to their surroundings and physicality – the type of femininity that we may each take enjoyment of and which ultimately ties us in knots. If dissociative feminism is a subject of conversation as of late – that’s, the removal of oneself from the body in an try and avoid discomfort or pain – Priscilla feels embodied in it, each in performance and in Coppola’s free-floating, daydreamy visual style and patterning.

It sees the technique of a groomed and abused young woman – though neither word was in common parlance in 60s vernacular – finding the courage to depart, but additionally it is deeply sympathetic to the real love and vulnerability inside that reality. It’s a story that feels anthropological, somewhat than biographical: a more heightened, fame-saturated version of what might befall many a young woman in a vintage era of ironclad gender expectations. Coppola has greater than once mentioned her mother Eleanor – married, in case you forgot, to a different very powerful and celebrated artist by the name of Francis – when talking about this movie.

And beyond that, there’s something larger – loath as I’m to make use of the word ‘universal’ – about Priscilla’s experiences. In suits and starts, many ladies can have had corollaries in their very own lives. Even simply that it’s easy to melt into another person’s personality if you find yourself a young girl and unsure of your personal identity; the world and the patriarchy conspire to make it easy. That ease is a sugar-kiss of seduction for Priscilla within the film, and certainly one of its most darkly tantalising elements. It’s abundantly clear why this example has happened: Elordi is breathtakingly beautiful to take a look at, promising his love and protection but in addition a complete glamorous world at his disposal. But the wonder and desire presented to her are ultimately empty and thwarted: Presley is withholding in terms of sex, wanting to attend until marriage after which being precious around his teen bride in favour of affairs on the side. For long periods, he’s away from Graceland. Priscilla moves through the splendour with lonely abandon, perfectly made-up just like the dolly she is, with Coppola slowing her editing rhythms and elegance consciously when the king will not be within the constructing, reflecting the boredom and frustration of her protagonist.

A movie that takes on feminine identity and lacquered artificiality as each a burden and a charm – and which is each sympathetic and cautionary in regards to the appeals of losing oneself within the arms of a person – Priscilla is a fragile masterwork. The genius of Coppola’s film is that it’s each knowingly hole and in some way deeply felt suddenly, celebrating female self-ownership and the travails of learning to know oneself.