Melania

If this has any purpose at all, it is to demonstrate just how running scared the American media conglomerates are of the Trump Organization. I would venture to suggest that this sterile and unrevealing feature has no rights value whatsoever, and that anyone would countenance paying $40 millions for it must stick in the throat of dozens of independent film makers who would give their eye-teeth for a share of such funding. There is a lot of hate around for this, but viewed with an open-mind it could have shone a light on the important work carried out by the First Lady. Instead, we simply watch an extended series of carefully crafted and entirely femicured photography that tells us precisely nothing about the job, or the lady herself. Never wearing the same outfit twice, who on earth cares about the many fittings for her inauguration coat, or their gold-embossed invitations to an intimate candlelit dinner (for about five hundred folk)? There are plenty of shots of her, perched atop her six inch heels, inhabiting what appear to be the service corridors of the Trump Tower before meeting a range of people, but we never really see her with her sleeves rolled up. There is one scene where a recently released Israeli hostage from the Hamas attack; a woman still concerned for the fate of her husband of forty-four years, is subjected to a metal detector sweep that rather summed this all up. You don’t get to Mrs. Trump unless it is all carefully choreographed and always with the focus on her. The whole thing reeks of faux-sensitivity. She is every bit as adept at playing the political game as her recently re-elected husband and that instinct to control the message is evident in spades here. There are one or two more human touches: she refers to the attempted murder of Donald in 2024 and breaks into the only behaviour remotely natural-looking with a tiny bit of “YMCA” from the “Village People”, but otherwise this merely follows a shrewd woman who never sets the veneer aside. I don’t know who wrote the grandiose narration, but given the standard of her spoken English it certainly can’t have been her and by the end of this I felt I had just been watching another “Barbie” movie, only nowhere near as much fun nor as real. Whether you are for or against the family agenda - and son Barron features more frequently towards the end to add a distinctly dynastic flavour to the proccedings, this is a cinematic meringue. It looks good but is insubstantial and frothy underneath.