Melania Trump – born Melanija Knavs – has led an undeniably fascinating life. Raised in the 1970s, in what was then Yugoslavia, she grew up in a state-run housing complex in present-day Slovenia. A teenage modelling contract saw her whisked around Europe and then, in the Nineties, to the United States, where she eventually met the unassuming, mild-mannered property tycoon, Donald Trump. It is a journey that bridges Europe and America, an aspirational story of a little girl with nothing but a perfect jawline; the sort of tale that draws the eye of Hollywood. Of course, this is all information I have extracted from Melania Trump’s Wikipedia page, because it is strikingly absent from the new Amazon documentary, Melania, which has just received a mysterious theatrical release.
Instead, Melania focuses on 20 days running up to the second Trump inauguration in January 2025. “Everyone wants to know,” Melania growls in voiceover, “so here it is.” Perhaps her lack of specificity on what exactly people want to know is deliberate. The documentary – with a runtime of 104 minutes – covers everything from the design of place settings and the width of hat ribbons to her excitement for her son Barron’s hypothetical “beautiful family” and sadness at the 2024 death of her mother. “Not a day goes by when I don’t think about my mother,” she laments in the film’s signature voiceover, while the camera holds a shot of the coffin of President Carter. This is American history through the idiosyncratic prism of a woman who is part-puppet of the regime, part-delusional creative, and part-symbol of America’s immigrant community.
“The golden age of America begins right now!” Trump bleats in his inaugural address, while Melania sits behind him, her face twitching unnervingly between pout and smile. Woven through the documentary’s depiction of the events in the run-up to the Trumps’ return to the White House are signs of the film’s strange genesis. Melania’s chief of staff denies a request from Matt Belloni, the entertainment journalist, to hear more about her mysterious Amazon deal. At the banquet dinner on inauguration eve (where guests are served a gold egg and caviar, because, as a sycophantic designer tells the first lady, “white and gold is you!”) viewers will repeatedly spy Amazon proprietor Jeff Bezos alongside other oligarchs like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook. For the rights to tell this “story”, Amazon paid around $40m, including $28m directly to Mrs Trump. An expensive seat at an expensive table.
But bearing first-person witness to history is a valuable commodity. The reins of the film have been handed to Brett Ratner, the director of Rush Hour and Tower Heist. His career has stalled somewhat after allegations of sexual assault and harassment (which he has denied) were made in 2017 (he also made a recent cameo in the release of select parts of the Epstein files). But just as Trump is getting a second shot at the presidency, so too does Ratner get his second chance. Who is your favourite musician, Ratner (against whom there have been accusations of wrongdoing) asks Melania. She responds with “Michael Jackson” (against whom there have been accusations of wrongdoing), detailing how she met the late singer with her husband (against whom there have been accusations of wrongdoing). Perhaps this is Ratner’s vision for a modern American: a country of forgiveness.
“No matter where [people] come from,” Melania announces during one of her grating voiceovers, “we are bound by the same humanity.” Though she speaks with a thick Slavic drawl, she refers only obliquely to her “country of birth” (Slovenia is referenced, directly, once). A parade of immigrants, including French-born fashion designer Hervé Pierre, appear to reinforce this vaguely cosmopolitan angle. “Opportunities, equality,” says Tham Kannalikham, a designer who moved to the US from Laos aged just two. “It’s really the American dream.” These are the good immigrants serving the Trump administration; a far cry from the ones in cages, the ones tear-gassed on the streets of Minneapolis, the ones festering in a jail cell in El Salvador.
To call Melania vapid would do a disservice to the plumes of florid vape smoke that linger around British teenagers. She calls herself a “mother, wife, daughter, friend”, yet is only depicted preening and scowling. Figures like Brigitte Macron and Queen Rania of Jordan appear to bolster Melania’s geopolitical credentials, yet time and again she returns to banal aphorisms. “Cherish your family and loved ones,” she implores audiences, who were, up until then, neglecting their family and despising their loved ones. Trump himself is an instantly more charismatic presence on screen. His scenes offer a relief from Melania’s mask of pure nothingness. Hitting cinemas as the streets of America remain filled with the angry and grieving – with the country on the verge of an irreparable schism – the vulgar, gilded lifestyle of the Trumps makes them look like Marie Antoinette skulking in her cake-filled chateau, or Hermann Göring’s staring up at his looted Monet.
The “film” is part propaganda, sure, and part sop to Big Tech companies who require constant regulatory approval for financial manoeuvrings. Even then, it is bad. It will exist as a striking artefact – like The Birth of a Nation or Triumph of the Will – of a time when Americans willingly subordinated themselves to a political and economic oligopoly. Organising plans for his return to the White House at 2am, after the Starlight Ball, Trump announces he will immediately “begin straightening out the nation”. “We’re all very grateful,” his event producer whimpers sycophantically. It is a visceral moment where audiences, around the world, will begin to taste the boot that the American establishment so blithely licks.
Then again, perhaps Melania is merely a piece of post-modern post-entertainment. After all, it is transparently not a documentary. Melania spends most scenes playing a staged version of herself, and shots of the first lady are composed with all the deliberateness Ratner brought to his work on X-Men: The Last Stand. This is somewhere between reality TV and pure fiction. As Donald and Melania waltz on the eve of their victory, a singer blares out: “Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.” Whose truth it is, however, and where it’s going, seems beyond the power of this captured documentary to reveal.
‘Melania’ is in cinemas
