And I will always love you
On Sofia Coppola, Dolly Parton and the importance of setting boundaries
*This article may contain spoilers about Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla*
To my English speaking readers: since my native language is Spanish, I apologise in advanced for any mistakes that you can find in the English version of this post. Thanks for your support! 😊
After a break that turned out to be way longer than I intended, The Aesthetics Filmclub is back with new content and a few changes. From now, you’ll get your Sunday cinema dosis (as you did before) and Thursday’s posts will be an occasional thing. As I’ve always had, I’ll keep posting everything both in English and Spanish, and you’ll be able to find each post under one of the two categories that we already had: “Thoughts on film” for the main content and “I was thinking…” for recommendations and random thoughts. And, of course, all the content already published will be available for you to read whenever you want.
So, without further ado, The Aesthetics Filmclub is up and running once again.
In 1973, Dolly Parton recorded, as part of her album Jolene, the song I Will Always Love You. In June of 1974, the song reached the top of the Billboard Hot Country Songs. In 1982, the song reached that number 1 again, thanks to a new recording, making Dolly Parton the first artist reaching the top of that list twice with the same song. In 1992, a new version of I Will Always Love You was recorded by Whitney Houston, becoming the main theme of The Bodyguard’s soundtrack, hitting the number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for 14 weeks in a row.
In 2023, Sofia Coppola used the song for the final scene of her latest movie, Priscilla.
If there’s one thing that can be said about Sofia Coppola as a filmmaker is her impecable taste in soundtracks. That’s why no-one seemed alarmed when she didn’t get the rights for Elvis Presley’s music to sound along Priscilla Beaulieu’s story: from the moment she met the king of pop for the first time in 1959, through their tempestuous marriage, to the moment she left Graceland, with a petition for divorce and a child in common. The movie was not about Elvis anyway.
Although we could talk all day about her music selection for this movie (as we could for any other of her movies), today I want to focus on her use of I Will Always Love You for the scene when Priscilla leaves Graceland at the end of the film.
Apparently, Elvis loved the song. Priscilla even told Dolly Parton once that he sang that song to her in the courthouse steps the day they got divorced. It’s not a surprise then that he wanted to record his own version.
The cover was ready, with Dolly’s approval, who had even been invited to listen to it. But, the night before the recording, she received a phone call from Colonel Tom Parker (Elvis’ manager, who we saw portrayed by Tom Hanks in Baz Luhrmann’s recent Elvis biopic) letting her know that Elvis didn’t record any song unless they had the publishing, and demanded that she gave them the publishing or at least half of it.
The answer, of course, was no. Being a singer, writer and producer, Dolly Parton had been in the music industry long enough to know that this was one of her most important copyrights and she would’t let it go, so Elvis’ cover never saw the light.
Her decision was also rewarded when, in 1992, the song was recorded by Whitney Houston (who was at the peak of her career) becoming the main theme for the movie The Bodyguard, and Dolly still had the full publishing. It’s estimated that the song made around 10 million dollars at the time, which were used by the artist to reactivate the economy of a neighbourhood in Nashville, where she bought a whole building to establish her offices.
The final scene of Sofia Coppola’s film gets a whole new dimension then. Priscilla leaves Graceland while we listen to a song that yes, could state that she’d always love Elvis, but is also an homage to that other woman who said no to the king of pop and who put limits to the abusive music (among many others) industry .
We see here how a detail that can seem small, as the choice of a song for a scene, can completely change the meaning of it and reinforce the message the director wants to send with the movie.
The ensamble Sofia-Dolly-Priscilla, as Graceland gets smaller and smaller on the rearview mirror, becomes the perfect closure to add a ray of hope to the story of a young woman finally escaping from her pastel coloured cage. Like Dolly, Sofia knows well what she is doing.