She is black, she is a woman, she is a descendant of slaves, she is the daughter of a working class family, she is a lawyer from Harvard University and her motto has always been not to answer those who insult her as black, woman and poor. "The more they lower themselves, the more we grow," he says. In a non-sick reading of the sick reality we live, it would be said that she was and continues to be the true anti-establishment . But fortunes of fate, that flag is now the property of, precisely, the whitest, richest and most masculine of establishments . Remember Michelle Obama(Chicago, 1964), we talk about her, that when she studied there were not a few who blamed her for being there as a black woman and poor. "Those who criticize positive discrimination," he says, "do not ask themselves, on the other hand, what athletes or those who have the place due to family inheritance do at university . " And it continues: contrary to the one that is aware of where it comes from, the privileged "strive to ignore how they got to where they are." And in this last statement a good part of the effort of the film that concerns us goes away: it is about vindicating the present day of the exact opposite of what the present day of the United States occupies today. As it is.
My story is the title, as routine as it is misleading, that the documentary recently released on Netflix on the figure of the one who was first lady between 2009 and 2017 receives in Spanish. In the original English, Becoming reads that, in an effort to translate something cacophonous, it could be understood as Converting . And somehow (much more spiritual and combative), in the reflective and transitory infinitive it is possible to find the image that the ex-wife of the 44th president of the United States wants to give to the world of herself: that of a woman who has reinvented and readapted to each of the circumstances that have come their way. In fact, the documentary signed by Nobody Hallgren is limited to following the protagonist in the tour of presentation of her memoir (which is now also published in Spanish Penguin Random House) through 34 cities among massive audiences. The idea is not to put an image on the text, but to complement it in the same way that the extras on a DVD from those from before plagued the lonely film with details.
From the outset, few matters as unpromising as that of a woman circling her country while signing dedications with a Stakhanovite will. The entire film, meticulously supervised by the Obama companies' own production company (Higher Ground Pro.), Is the opposite of the revisionist documentary that wants to settle accounts with the past. Let no one approach him hungry for revelation, much less morbid. It is, in its fiercest orthodoxy, a propaganda tape so rigorous and faithfully delivered to its protagonist that it would be said part of the electoral campaign of a candidate who is not. And yet, in the clean, detailed and precise explanatory statement, My Story manages to surprise by the emotion and certainty of a discourse that is as evident as it is forgotten. It is not written that he wants to be an anti-Trump film (he is never quoted), but by force of making the obvious appear it ends up being nothing else. All that Michelle Obama wants to represent is what the current President of the United States denies.
Let's say, to the extreme of reasoning, that My story ends up being liked even in spite of itself. Michelle wants to convey to the audience the idea that she refused to be a vase in her husband's affair; who always saw in the possibility of reaching "the palaces of the world" an opportunity to send a message not so much of improvement, but also of justice. His speech is addressed to the new generations, to the future that, he says, will come despite everything. He laughs at the fact already refuted by the same facts that with the arrival of the first black president there would be no turning back. There was. He also laments the non-stop racism and bitterly recalls the Charleston murders. You have to pay, however, the toll of admonitions very close to self-help on the obligation to "refuse to be just a figure . "
But when all the smoke from the previous paragraph disappears, the film manages to make the woman who endured the disproportionate attacks of the conservative press quite clear while fighting against the iron rigor of a society that reminds her of a and again that she is a woman ("No matter how hard you try in a speech, how you neglect yourself, she will always end up talking about your dress"), that she is black and that her family was poor. "I come down from the top to tell the poor and working-class youth that when someone tells them to go back to their place, don't listen to them," he says, and in the phrase announces his latest conversion. That's what this is all about, to become.
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