It’s the heels you see first…vertiginous white stilettos. Then the front of the shoes… leopardskin with a red trim. Eventually the camera moves up and there’s a striking white cotton dress, nipped in waist, full skirt. Then a shot of Melania from the back. And only in the limousine do you see Melania full-on, almost smiling.
That’s the big reveal in this film. The enigma smiles, she actually does. Her face in repose looks closed, but that, I think, is the Balkan look. If you take this film for what it is, Melania’s own, curated take on herself, then there’s one thing she wants to get across, it’s that there’s human warmth there under the cheekbones and the slanting feline eyes. May I say right now she looks extraordinary for 55?
She thanks the staff who say goodbye at Mar-a-Lago, and she seems genuinely glad to see everyone at the White House when she gets back there. She’s plainly a friend of her designer, Herve Pierre - they talk shop about her dress. She hugs a former Israeli hostage after she sobs in front of her and admires the picture of her husband, Keith, on her t-shirt. She goes to the Arlington memorial and thinks about the families of the boys that were lost in the Afghan withdrawal. She’s not Princess Di, but she wants us to know she cares. She has herself filmed at the back of her limousine singing along – though we don’t really hear what her voice is like – to Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean. At the second of the three balls on inauguration night, she lets herself go a bit to YMCA, and jives just a little, momentarily like the flirty teenager she once must have been, before returning to her default reserve.
This is, remember, all her own work, or at least as mediated by Brett Ratner, the producer (who has a lot to thank her for in rehabilitating him after some years in the Holly wood doghouse), so what we see is what she wants us to see. And at the front of what she gives us is a devoted daughter. She attends with Donald the funeral of the former president, Jimmy Carter, but it’s the first anniversary of her mother Amalija’s death, and she’s still mourning. She tells us “I think about her every day”. She’s impassive in black at Washington cathedral, but it’s her own mother she’s thinking about.
After she returns to New York, she makes a trip – “some time by myself” – to St Patrick’s Cathedral to light a candle (actually a few) for her mother. She stands before the high altar silently – she’s meant to genuflect, bend the knee, but it may be tricky in those heels to get up again- and we can only surmise what her own relationship with God is. One of the two beaming clerics at the entrance, who are plainly loving all this, offers to bless her as she leaves, and she says, yes, that would be nice. But she doesn’t cross herself. She tells them, “My mother came here often when she was in New York”. She gets her father, Viktor, to pay tribute to the nearly 60 years the couple spent married. “My parents’ marriage was an example of life-long love,” she says, which puts her own union with Trump into a new perspective. Slovenia, her country of birth, gets a look in with the Slovene crystal coupes at the dinner, but she’s keen to present herself as an American patriot.
What you also get is a sense of her steely self discipline. She puts us in our place at the off by saying that her architecture degree (she left university after a few months, but no matter) means that she has an “artistic vision”. That means in practice an awful lot of work on the detail of the official entertainments for the inauguration…we see her consultant, at one point, unveiling a big reveal in tissue paper, which no one has yet seen. What can it be? It’s the official invitation for the inauguration ball. “Red. Your colour,” he breathes. “It’s beautiful, she murmurs. And when it comes to the entertainments, she’s on the detail there too: caviar in gold eggs. Really.
She put in, she tells us, a lot of work from her teenage years into her career as a model. If you factor into that her mother’s job as a tailor/dressmaker, it’s plain she doesn’t regard being a clotheshorse as something rather shameful. We get a lot of the discussion that goes into the making of her outfits. Pierre Herve, the designer, is a class act; “She’s very different”, he tells us, because she knows what she’s talking about. “My mother taught me” she says, “that it’s all about the discipline of the craft”. And so we find her talking about the width of her lapels for the inauguration outfit, or asking for her skirt to be closer at the hip with the eye of an expert.
But she also wants us to know, because she tells us, that she has remade the role of the First Lady. We see her talking about children’s screen time with Brigitte Macron – polished, in brown leather jacket – on Zoom. We see her face to face with Queen Rania of Jordan, about her special project, care for children in foster care, and they promise to work together. She gives, in the closing credits, an account of her achievements in the role: the banning of non consensual sexual images, the letter to President Putin that secured the release of kidnapped Ukrainian children, the release of that Israeli hostage (if only she’d met some Palestinians too, heaven knows what might have come from it); and the work for foster children. She’s done things, she wants us to know.
The camera rests on the portraits of three former first ladies: Eleanor Roosevelt, Maimie Eisenhower and Jackie Kennedy (the only previous incumbent who was more striking than she ). We’re being invited to see Melania in that series: will it be the groundbreaking Mrs Roosevelt, the homely Maimie or the legendary Jackie that she channels? She’s doing her own thing with the role, and the documentary is part of that.
Is the film worth $40 million? I can’t see it myself, except for the unforgettable shot of Kamala Harris at the inauguration, which is worth paying for, but if Jeff Bezos and his millions are that easily parted, good luck to her. The greatest relief in the whole thing came when she actually took her heels off, after three balls, and, as she says, 22 hours without sleep. She’s a phenomenon. What, exactly, is her relationship with Trump, who was effusive about, “my beautiful wife”? We don’t know. The enigma remains.
Melania is in cinemas now
