One imagines that the makers of this documentary about Melania Trump set out to illuminate a life that has long been obscured by the lacquer of celebrity and political spectacle. Instead, what they have produced resembles something closer to a decorative vase: polished, expensive-looking, and entirely hollow when one peers inside. The film drifts from scene to scene with the languid confidence of a project that assumes significance merely by proximity to fame. Yet significance, like intelligence, cannot be borrowed indefinitely.
The subject herself once possessed a career that, at the very least, had the virtue of clarity. As a model - sometimes clothed, sometimes rather conspicuously not - Melania Trump inhabited an industry that rarely pretends to be more than it is: the sale of image. Throughout the movie, her English, spoken only in fragments - small, battered phrases that arrived like luggage from a long journey, missing pieces and occasionally the handle - proves stubbornly resistant to comprehension. Of course, in her line of work, she required very little of it to conduct her business. Like her husband, the many men who begged her call were never in pursuit of grammar. The documentary, by contrast, seems determined to inflate this past into a myth of glamour and intrigue, while simultaneously being embarrassed by it. The result is a peculiar dance of suggestion and evasion, as though the film cannot quite decide whether it is chronicling a biography or laundering one.
More striking, however, is the sense that no one involved appears entirely certain what the documentary is actually about. Is it a portrait of a private woman thrust into public life? A meditation on celebrity? A historical footnote to a controversial presidency? The film flirts with each possibility before abandoning it with the attention span of a goldfish. One begins to suspect that even Melania Trump herself - appearing in carefully staged fragments of indecipherable reflection - might struggle to explain the thesis of the enterprise bearing her name.
The overwhelming impression is one of vapidity. Not the charming lightness of a confection, but the sterile emptiness of a showroom. Interviews float by without friction; narration offers platitudes where inquiry might have lived. The viewer is left contemplating the strange achievement of a documentary that manages to say almost nothing about its subject while speaking at considerable length.
Indeed, if the choice were between this cinematic exercise in atmospheric nothingness and a two-hour film about storm systems forming over the Atlantic, one might reasonably prefer the latter. At least a documentary on stormy weather would possess drama, movement, and a recognizable narrative arc: pressure builds, clouds gather, lightning strikes. In this film, the barometric pressure never changes.
One cannot quite shake the suspicion that the director’s motives may have less to do with artistic curiosity than with professional self-preservation. The project has the air of a polite offering - an ornamental gesture perhaps useful in quieting murmurs of impropriety or questionable associations elsewhere. If so, it succeeds admirably as a form of cinematic diplomacy. As a documentary, however, it is little more than an elegantly packaged void.
And that, perhaps, is the final irony. A life once devoted to the careful presentation of image has inspired a film that mistakes presentation for substance entirely. The camera gazes, the music swells, the platitudes accumulate - and when the credits roll, one realizes that the documentary has achieved the remarkable feat of leaving its subject exactly where it began: impeccably styled, thoroughly distant, and essentially unknown.
Ciao. For now.
-Ash