"Becoming", portrait of a First Lady from the United States

NETFLIX – ON REQUEST – DOCUMENTARY

The show leaves no room for improvisation. Each time, it's a hip-hop or RnB tune (often Girl on Fire, by Alicia Keys) resonating in the walls of a room crammed full of mostly female audiences. Then comes from behind the scenes a tall familiar figure, drawn to the nines. Michelle Obama warmly welcomes the host (most often a hostess) who receives her on the stage and then engages in a conversation-debate in front of an audience with sparkling eyes of admiration, who drinks the words of the ex-first lady. These big shows – the high price of tickets had reacted at the time – punctuated in the United States and abroad the release of the memories of the former lawyer, To become (Fayard, 2018), and are the backbone of the documentary that Netflix, with whom the Obama established a partnership in 2018, devotes to it.

"The goal of this tour was to find the time to look back, to understand what I had experienced", she explains in voice over. The excessive shows are only one part, the signing sessions and especially the meetings in small groups with groups of young people, its audience of predilection, are another.

If we put aside the emotion that Michelle Obama causes in her fans (groupies?) And the " positive attitude " mandatory, as moving as it is irritating, which sticks to the atmosphere of all the lady's meetings with her audience, To become has the advantage of having taken hold of what makes up the substance of these memories: the gaze of a black American woman, descended from slaves, who reached the summit ("I went to all the authorities", she recalls, without childishness), and who will now focus on understanding how and why it happened. With the hope of sharing it with future generations.

Glorification of an ascent

On the other hand, his weakness is that he wants to be both a film on tour and a portrait, because he manages to be neither one nor the other. If the images of the tour give the full measure of the popularity of the ex-first lady, the final cut is curiously disjointed. Just like the choice of testimonies, which rake far too wide. We meet very briefly people as different as his security guard, his chief of staff, his stylist, his brother. Everyone has interesting things to say, but it will obviously be for the next time. Only the passages in which Michelle Obama visits her family, evokes the founding role of her parents and her childhood in Chicago, resist superficiality.

Another interesting passage looks back at Barack Obama's campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2007 and recalls the violence of the attacks against his wife: she explains that she stopped speaking freely at that time, forcing herself "To read prompters". Her experience is painfully reminiscent of that of Hillary Clinton, as she describes in detail in Hillary, the far more substantial four-part documentary that Hulu aired earlier this year.

The charismatic personality of Michelle Obama, her rejection of miserabilism and cutthroat, her humor and her sense of formula save this documentary from the mediocrity of its production, but To become Netflix version is it anything other than the glorification of a rise as admirable as exceptional, when one knows that social mobility in the United States is actually lower than that of most developed countries?