Released — under no coincidental pretexts — within the same month as Jacinda Ardern’s autobiographical memoir of her time as New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Michelle Walshe and Lindsay Utz’s synonymous documentary provides not an analysis or journalistic overview of her tenure, but an exaggerated puff piece where the intrapersonal rumination of “can I be both a new mother and Prime Minister?” supersedes questions of political legacy, national historicity, or the encroachment of globalizing neoconservative influence that was the catalyst to Jacinda’s resignation. Instead, these omnipresent faculties of Ardern’s incumbency are transmogrified into a marginality, the intimate struggles of her private life in office and how she gathers material for the now-published book taking precedent in a profile whose only intrigue lies in the individualizing values of humanism that fortify the importance of an empathic interlocutor between state and polity. Prime Minister affirms itself as a 100-minute project wherein its entire informational body can be consumed just as easily across two five-minute reads in The Guardian.
Not once, but twice, does Prime Minister kick into gear a pop-backed montage of political meetings and ceremonies. Lorde’s recognizable twang invites Labour’s initial win with a collection of celebratory redundancies, as though this history was ongoing, as if Jacinda hadn’t already been out of office for two years. In retrospect, we’re supposed to memorialize this victory as something significant, regardless of how little context the film is willing to provide as to the lasting impact of policy passed under Ardern’s two terms. We’re implored to celebrate the private citizen becoming a public star, decontextualizing the bureaucratic machinations of Labour’s minority entanglement and their eventual majority leadership. There’s no room, sadly, for the content that makes up government. In lieu of this, we are left with a commercial, a tease for the book guaranteed to land as a NYT best-seller. For this writer, such industrial aspiration is grotesque and useless: a film ostensibly about politics wielded as an insulated promotional device. These aesthetic configurations seduce audiences into the jollification of consumptive praxis. “Come recognize and extol this history-defining era, which we will not get into detail regarding, where we will refuse engagement with the inherent problematics of governance under colonial continuities!”
Thinking critically about the festivals providing this work a platform, the heightened profile caked onto this title must be a cynical ploy for commercial relevance, co-opting already liberalized narratives and enshrining them with aspirational capital. How does an advertisement for a memoir world premiere at Sundance, move successfully on to the Sydney Film Festival, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, and eventually centerpiece the New Zealand International Film Festival? What are these organizations offering in terms of provocative, educational platforming if they’re so willing to invite feature-length publicity as a showcase of contemporary artistic creation? Are these spaces not simply further organizing their dissonance from the world they purport to represent? With a film such as Prime Minister, they not only fail to address the cultural conflicts they and their audiences are beset by, but only further attest to the crude bureaucratic alienation that informs their infrastructural make-up.
This drive for individualization, which the film ideologically confirms in its isolating portrait, is in response to a crumbling cultural sector — an industry seeking to rectify the failures of neoliberalism as global politics become severely out of step with the liberal order that an institutional hegemony has made the bed for. A film such as this cuts off the capacity for both curiosity and criticality. Here, we are provided a cultural object that is plucked from its circumstances, made specifically to engage with the immediacy of consumptive pliancy, and which exceptionalizes the individual against the anonymity of coagulating reactionary movements. What this does is influence an ideology where the people are easily discarded as irresponsible. There is no serious consideration of the power behind neoconservative populism. Consequently, one’s perception of these forces becomes facile, and one’s response becomes reified back into the reliance on political infrastructure that helped form these bodies of fascist inclination to begin with. The inaction and irreflexive qualities of liberal democracy, playing the character of false counter-hegemonic bulwark, fortify the encroaching reactionary populism that this film makes a passing joke of. In taking on the subject matter of a Prime Minister’s tenure, the filmmakers have chosen to excise all political considerations that come with said job, sequestering the titular responsibility and churning the head of state into but a name tag, caring more for the preparatory work of autobiography than the inheritance of an ethos and the forms it shapes society with.
DIRECTOR: Lindsay Utz & Michelle Walshe; CAST: Jacinda Ardern; DISTRIBUTOR: Magnolia Pictures; IN THEATERS: June 13; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 36 min.
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