To the question whether the Melania Trump documentary is as bad as the critics are saying, my answer would be: it depends what you’re looking for. My own view is that it’s pretty well what it is billed as: Melania’s take on Melania, with the lady herself in iron control over the direction. So, not a documentary in the normal sense, for better and worse. It’s her account of the 20 days up to and including her husband’s inauguration, with the emphasis exactly where she decides to put it. The benefit of this is that we see what she regards as important, not what other people do. She’s calling the shots, thank you very much.

What kind of life is it, to be forever worrying about an assassin?

It is, for instance, quite inconceivable that a male documentary maker, or most female ones, would have spent as much time as she did on the fittings for her inaugural outfits. Everyone, without exception, has sneered at this focus on the size of her lapels, the length of the sash on her gown, her concern about the hat being quite, quite flat and not, as she put it, “wiggly-wobbly” (the critics had fun with that). Absolutely no-one would have given space to her couturier, Herve Pierre, complimenting himself on a completely invisible seam on that white sheath of an inauguration gown; the seam was, it seems, hidden away under the gift-wrap ribbon of a black sash winding itself around the sheath. (John Galliano, my fashion friend tells me, was brilliant at this.) But she did. And you know why? It was a kind of tribute to her late mother, who was a seamstress herself and showed her the craft of couture in her own work. She recognises skill in Pierre, because she grew up with it. What’s more she’s a former model, which she says she worked hard to be, and she knows what works and how to wear it. But this notion that making and wearing clothes effectively is itself rather demanding is something most commentators can’t be doing with. Fair enough, but as I say, this is Melania on Melania.

So, the apparent vanity and frivolity of the fittings is not quite what the airheadedness it seems. Take, too, the inordinate emphasis in the documentary on limousines and aeroplanes. That comes across badly…boring, or what? But what if that is a disproportionate element of her life, this grisly business of stepping into limousines before climbing into planes before getting into a limousine at the head of another motorcade? She is alone in the Trump jet (the name emblazoned on the side) for the security detail follows way behind her, but following her car en route to the airport, there is a succession of others…her security. She’s followed everywhere she goes. It’s not at all clear that she’s consciously indicating that she’s living in a hellish bubble, but for a normal viewer, this sense that the woman must always be followed is rather terrible. In fact on one of those journeys, she’s with staff and she picks Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean to sing along to, but the sense we get in the film is of aloneness.

We also see the underside of security. She enters one building – it may be Trump Towers – not by the front door but by the back, the servants’ entrance, presumably to avoid being seen. Later, during the inauguration, it happens again: Trump and Melania leave a glittering gathering by the back door. So we move from one set of colours to another: from the white and gold glitz of a banquet to the grey and black concrete of the back steps where the staff come in and leave. That, again, deliberate and I’m not sure a professional would have chosen to represent it, but it tells us about the realities of her life.

Then there’s her concern about security. She deliberately includes a session with the security operative where she and Donald discuss the possibility of meeting the public. “Will it be safe?” she asks, observing that her son Barron will be staying put in the car. When, eventually, the organisers decide that on account of the extreme cold, the public encounters will be indoors, she says she’s relieved; it will be possible to check that the attendees are safe. What kind of life is it, to be forever worrying about an assassin? But that’s what she chose to let us see.

The most difficult element of the documentary is her own emphasis on her beauty. She is beautiful in her fashion, astonishingly so for 55, but it normally doesn’t do to notice. But what’s almost the first thing we see in Melania? It’s her vertiginous stiletto heel, with the shot moving to the front of the shoe and then to a shapely calf. We get the full ivory skirt of a lovely cream dress before we actually see her face. There are several shots of her stilettos, including one of a cropped black boot with its deadly heel descending from a car, which may rouse some viewers from their slumbers, and another of her heels climbing to a plane.

It’s quite a feat to be able to balance in these things, yet she maintains her poise even going down wet steps at the Arlington cemetery for a commemoration of servicemen killed in the withdrawal from Afghanistan (she does indeed tell us how she feels for their families). She is beautiful and she knows it (she is a former model) and she doesn’t hide it, and that’s challenging in a culture where looks are a currency, but nowadays an unacknowledged asset. Melania, by contrast, grew up in the former Yugoslavia, where people were quite embarrassingly frank about women’s attractiveness. Her accent is strong and you can’t help feeling that this is an element of her bad press; she looks impassive and she sounds Balkan.

There’s one thing she focuses on particularly, and that’s her grief for her late mother. It was the first anniversary of her death when she and her husband go to the funeral of Jimmy Carter, and it’s her mother, Amalija, who is on her mind. “I think about her every day”, she says, and puts Trump before the camera to say that she was a wonderful mother-in-law. And it’s on account of her mother that we get a glimpse of her own faith. She wants to be alone, she says, to think about her mother and so she goes to St Patrick’s Cathedral, where she stands silently before the altar (you’re meant to genuflect, to go down on one knee, but she doesn’t) before lighting some candles. On the way out, one of the priests at the entrance offers to bless her and she accepts, but she doesn’t bless herself; we are left knowing nothing about her relationship with her baptismal faith. But this episode is put centre stage. It jars less than the minister saying a prayer before one dinner on the eve of the inauguration and declaring that Donald Trump’s election was in response to the prayers of people across the globe.

Of course there’s more; she lays a good deal of emphasis on her philanthropic work: with Queen Rania of Jordan, on helping foster children; with Brigitte Macron, who’s right behind her, apparently, on lessening children’s screen time. She’s seen meeting a former Israeli hostage of the Hamas attacks who movingly begs for her help in releasing her husband, Keith. She hugs her, promises that when her husband takes power, it’ll be a priority, and we learn at the end that Keith was indeed released. What would have happened, you wonder, if she’d met Palestinians afflicted on the other side?

There are lots of elements of the documentary that jar, like her insistence that she lives every moment “with purpose”; there’s a lot of that sort of guff. We learn she’s remaking the role of first lady (the camera dwells on Eleanor Roosevelt, Mamie Eisenhower and Jackie Kennedy), and that children will be her priority. We see a bit of Barron, who tries to channel his father’s gestures…oh dear.

But the thing about the documentary is that Melania was answering the question that, she says, “Everyone is asking?” Who is she? She’s taken Jeff Bezos’ millions – $28 million, reputedly – for this documentary, and she’s used it to present herself on her own terms. And at the end of it, she’s kept most of herself back. Rather a feat, that. And since you’re asking, I’d say the best bit of it is at the inauguration when we see Kamala Harris’s expression. Priceless.