'Melania', the music video of the first lady
After the great roar of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion, a camera transports us to Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate. The music plays. Gimme shelterThe Rolling Stones' song plays, and the protagonist appears. We only see her feet, in elegant snakeskin shoes with stiletto heels. Inside the car, we discover her, her gaze lost in the distance.
Melania Trump wants to be seen as an object of supreme perfection. The documentary, in which the protagonist is credited as executive producer, shows us the twenty days before her husband's inauguration. "The transition from private citizen to first lady," she says, and her "high personal standardsThe visual production is impeccable. The opening resembles a fictional film, an aspirational narrative based on appearances. It's an aesthetic exercise in propaganda and an image makeover for the couple. In President Trump's sporadic appearances, he's portrayed as an attentive, humorous, and hardworking man. Melania It's invasive and unnecessary. She reads a script with simplistic, empty, and repetitive rhetoric that attempts to hijack the image. Melania attends Jimmy Carter's state funeral and turns the ceremony into a tribute to her late mother. The subsequent visit to St. Patrick's Cathedral is obscene, as if power were granted to her by divine will. The editing juxtaposed the image of the religious building with the image of Trump Tower, in a disturbing transposition of the sacred dimension. From one god to another.
Throughout the documentary, hits by Michael Jackson, Tears for Fears, The Crystals, James Brown, and a typical repertoire of classical pieces are played to add distinction and magic. Melania presents herself as a wife, mother, businesswoman, philanthropist, and first lady. But above all, we see her meticulously attending to ornamental aspects: the choice of her wardrobe, the tableware, the glassware, the carpets, menus featuring golden soft-boiled eggs, and the decoration of events related to the presidency. This is the most enticing part. The documentary gains access to the inner workings and most superfluous aspects of presidential logistics: hallways, meetings, and speech rehearsals. It even includes awkward photographs with the service staff, teams comprised primarily of Latin American workers.
Melania It's a documentary showcasing power without subtlety or deeper meaning. It's flat. It leaves no room for reflection or interpretation because it imposes a single perspective. In any case, only cynicism remains.
With patriotic rhetoric, the protagonist speaks to us of equality, rights, unity, and a sense of duty, referring to herself as a migrant. The entire display of her humanitarian work is a fantasy, because it's all just words, never action. The documentary closes with a list of political feats achieved by the first lady that we haven't seen on screen. And she bids farewell by getting into the armored car, reminding us that she will continue working.with purpose and style", with intention and style, as if it were the end of an episode of Sex and the City.
