Melania Review – Trump’s Movie Is a Remake of the Gilded Garbage of the Area of ​​Interest | Melania

MThe audience was booked with Melania for lunch on Friday at a retail park on the outskirts of Bristol, inside a large cinema that appears to have been bulldozed and emptied in preparation. When Brett Ratner’s controversial Amazon-backed documentary was screened at the White House last weekend, the guest list included Mike Tyson, Queen Rania of Jordan and the president himself. Today it’s just me in the room and Melania on the screen. It makes the relationship more intimate and exclusive.

This mood of comfortable familiarity extends all the way through the opening credits; At this point the cold snaps and the conversation begins, as the film’s star and executive producer proceeds to guide us — painfully slowly — through the preparations for her husband’s second presidential inauguration. She slides from fitted costumes to table setting, from “candlelit dinner” to “starlight ball,” with a fist-like face and a sheet-metal voice. “Candlelight, black tie, and my creative vision,” she says, as if listing the ingredients in a cauldron. “As First Lady, kids will always be my top priority,” she says, and you can almost imagine her trying to coax them into her little gingerbread house.

No doubt there’s a great documentary to be made about Melania Knaus, the aspiring model from out of Slovenia who married a New York real estate mogul and then found herself cast as Eva Braun, but the appalling Melania is definitely not that. It’s one of those rare films that doesn’t have a single edge. I’m not even sure it qualifies as a documentary, quite so much as it is an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly expensive and cold to the touch and presented like a medieval homage to appease a greedy king on his throne.

And so it continues. Melania moves through the event like a lethargic robot, constantly talking but saying nothing, and is whisked from Mar-a-Lago to Trump Tower to her final destination, the White House. What drama there is mainly based on her worry that her white blouse is too loose at the neck and has to be cut and then tightened, much to the consternation of the mechanics. Melania says she misses her mother, but she loves Michael Jackson and Barron and perhaps her husband, too, though Trump himself is often a presence in the background here, periodically going around bragging about his election victory and complaining that his inauguration is conflicting with televised college football games. “Maybe they did it on purpose,” he says.

It’s frustrating, deadly, and astonishingly unrevealing. Ratner’s film is like a remake of Jonathan Glazer’s “Zone of Interest,” as a button-eyed Cinderella points out gold ornaments and designer dresses, slyly distracting us as her husband and his cronies prepare to dismantle the Constitution and strip the federal government of its assets. “White and gold — that’s you,” one of the gals purrs as she fusses over the color scheme of the ball, and the incoming First Lady exclaims yes indeed, that’s right.

It’s not a spoiler to reveal, and thankfully Trump’s second inauguration is going well in the end. This despite the unfortunate clash with the College Football Playoff. This despite the infuriating sag in the First Lady’s white blouse. The preparations are exhausting but the exhilaration of the moment passes through her, right up to the star ball where she dances briefly along to the Village People’s YMCA. “Staying awake for 22 hours felt like nothing,” she gushes, which is nice to hear and helpful for her. But the fun is not contagious, the guests are a nightmare, and two hours with Melania seem like an endless hell.