Melania <\/p>\n
\ue9d9 \ue9d7 \ue9d7 \ue9d7 \ue9d7 <\/p>\n
Director: Brett Ratner<\/p>\n
Cert: PG<\/p>\n
Starring: Melania Trump, Donald Trump, Brigitte Macron, Queen Rania, Barron Trump, Peter Sohn<\/p>\n
Running Time: 1 hr 44 mins<\/p>\n
There is one (and maybe only one) extraordinary moment in Brett Ratner\u2019s somniferous documentary on the current first lady of the United States. Towards the close, as Donald<\/a> and Melania Trump<\/a>, in the last hours of inauguration day, lope across a heavily decorated section of Washington, DC, the soundtrack \u2013 already much at home to your dad\u2019s first iPod \u2013 happens upon The Crystals\u2019 immortal Then He Kissed Me. You know? The song most famous for playing while Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco, as a New York gangster and his wife, stride confidently into the Copacabana Club in Goodfellas. Is this a gag? Almost certainly not. Never have I encountered a film so lacking in irony and self-awareness. One can only assume Ratner, he of the Rush Hour action flicks, was so bored by his own movie that his attention wandered fatally.<\/p>\n Not that many people will notice. There is an ancient cartoon \u2013 maybe from as long ago as the 1970s \u2013 that depicts a group of gaunt, shaggy people sitting in a circle surrounded by bongs and syringes. \u201cYou mean we\u2019re all investigative journalists doing a piece on the drug epidemic?\u201d one says.<\/p>\n This came to me while looking around the 14 or so people (more than you might guess) gathered for an early evening screening of Melania in a Dublin city-centre cinema. Were they all journalists reviewing a film that arrived in 3,000 cinemas across the world without, for understandable reasons, a preceding press show? Not such a mad idea. The Guardian reported that one rescheduled screening in Islington \u2013 a media-friendly quarter of north London \u2013 actually sold out because it was full of \u201cnotepad wielding journalists\u201d.<\/p>\n The picture\u2019s financing has already attracted much puzzled reporting. Amazon MGM is said to have paid $40 million (\u20ac33.7 million) for the rights to a film that, even with journos forced to fork out real money, was never likely to challenge Avatar: Fire and Ash<\/a> at the box office. Add on another $35 million (\u20ac29.5 million) or so on marketing and you have got some white elephant on your hands.<\/p>\n If one was being polite one might explain the film was made with the full co-operation of producer Mrs M Trump (who allegedly trousered a fair whack of Amazon\u2019s 40 big ones). If one was being less compliant one would describe Ratner\u2019s project as shameless propaganda. But not active, forceful propaganda in the school of Leni Riefenstahl\u2019s films about the Nazis. Melania: The Movie appears keener on inducing narcolepsy in its viewers than energising them into massed marching. Triumph of the Dull, perhaps.<\/p>\n [\u00a0Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler\u2019s favourite film-maker: \u2018After the first page of Mein Kampf she became an enthusiastic Nazi\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n The picture, beginning in early 2025, walks us through a stupefying array of Melania\u2019s engagements as she prepares for her husband\u2019s inauguration. To be fair, in the opening conversations about fashion, she seems to know what she is talking about and earns apparently deserved respect from circling designers and stylists. The MelaniaBot is then placed on to her casters and wheeled around the great and the good while spouting a numbing stream of mechanical inanities. She and Brigitte Macron, wife of the French president, say various things about the world\u2019s foster children. She meets a recently released Israeli hostage and gives her an icy hug. At President Jimmy Carter\u2019s funeral, Melania\u2019s monotonous voice-over dwells mainly on the death of her own mother. <\/p>\n Worthwhile insights into her relationship with the Donald are rare. Aware of the camera throughout \u2013 this doesn\u2019t really count as fly-on-the-wall \u2013 he speaks to her (and us) much as he speaks to the assembled press corps. The first time we hear him he is boasting to the missus about how hugely he won the 2024 election. All the swing states. The popular vote. \u201cBigger than anticipated!\u201d<\/p>\n