CThis is the film that Donald Trump’s entire campaign team wanted banned. Failure: despite threats of prosecution and other barking from watchdogs last spring, The Apprentice will arrive on screens this October 19 in France (October 11 in the United States). That’s a little less than a month before the first round of the American presidential election, on November 5.
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Even one of the film’s producers, pro-Trump billionaire Dan Snyder, turned against this devastating biopic of the ex-president, current candidate for a second term, believing he had been cheated by the authors, the Iranian director -Danish Ali Abbasi and the screenwriter-journalist Gabriel Sherman. Furious, he finally withdrew his shares in the production of The Apprentice, in the name of the eternal “creative conflict”.
Already author of the magnificent thriller The Nights of Mashhad (2022), on the hunt for a serial killer in the depths of this holy city, Ali Abbasi observes in The Apprentice another « killer » : Trump, a man consumed by a thirst for power fueled by the values of an unbridled capitalist system, during the Reagan era.
In the role of this modern substitute for Barry Lyndon (Kubrick’s film is an admitted Abbasi reference): Sebastian Stan, 42 years old, ex-superhero at Marvel, here wigged, over-made-up, peroxide blonde, 7 kilos overweight thanks to repeated consumption of sodas… And perfectly credible in Trump, a young wolf from the Big Apple, who appears, at the start of the film, as a collector of unpaid rent in the slums built by his real estate developer father, Frederick Trump. Like a common slumlord, Donald goes door to door to intimidate deadbeats, while frequenting, in the evening, high society in a private club in Manhattan.
In this dark place filmed as the antechamber of Lucifer, Donald will meet another damned soul: the ultraconservative lawyer Roy Cohn (extraordinary Jeremy Strong, star of the series Succession), who will take the future golden boy under his wing and pass on to him his three sacred commandments to crush the enemy in society: 1) always attack; 2) never admit the truth; 3) never admit defeat.
Filmed in square format, with an image with a vintage aesthetic first evoking grainy 16 millimeter film to evolve into a video clip typical of the archives of a news broadcast from the eighties, The Apprentice posed a serious conscience problem for Abbasi. “I hesitated for a long time before accepting. History will judge us with this film: I wanted to both free myself from any crude moral judgment on Trump and still make sure not to be complicit in his legend, explains Ali Abbasi to Point.Favor a video and square image rather than filming The Apprentice in cinemascope – although I love this format – it is a political choice: I did not want to make an epic film, I did not want to risk embellishing reality. I wanted a raw image, like this business world. I also didn’t want the film to revolve exclusively around Trump. The subject for me was his relationship as disciple and mentor with Roy Cohn and the Darwinist system which allowed these two men to satisfy their killer instincts…” Ultimately, the crueler of the two beasts will end up devouring the other.
Fury from the Trump camp
Filmed in Toronto, a city often chosen as a stand-in for the overly expensive New York by productions with modest budgets, The Apprentice certainly does not spare the ex-president but dares, as Abbasi wished, to slip a little nuance into his charge. The first part of the film describes a left-sided Trump, timid, almost endearing in his clumsiness, while saluting his indisputable vision of the tourist future of New York, where he wants to bring out the most beautiful skyscrapers in the middle of the cut neighborhoods. -gorge of Manhattan. But, like a night falling little by little on his soul, the young man’s determination to rise ever higher makes him at once merciless, pathetic and terrifying.
The Apprentice bases his account on several sources, including the sulfurous unauthorized biography of Trump: Lost Tycoon. The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump, by journalist Harry Hurt III, published in 1993. As for the shocking scene of the plot – the marital rape of Ivana Trump (played by Maria Bakalova) by a Donald who has gone for good to the dark side – Harry Hurt III described in his book based on a sworn testimony from Ivana, during her divorce proceedings against Donald. The former Mrs. Trump, who died in 2022, had since retracted her statements when her ex-husband became president of the United States… but Sherman and Abbasi decided to include this episode.
This scene infuriated those close to Trump. Faced with threats of defamation lawsuits still brandished by the Republican candidate for the White House, Abbasi retorts: “These facts are documented. Trump’s lawyers are jumping to conclusions about a film they haven’t seen. For my part, I think that we have produced a fair work, about a man who has evolved his discourse by knowing how to decode what peoplewanted to hear. »
In the meantime, on September 3, the American distributor (the small independent company Briarcliff Entertainment) of this visually composed fresco named in a nod to the famous reality TV show The Apprentice that Donald Trump presented on NBC in the 2000s and 2010s -, had to launch a crowdfunding campaign on the Kickstarter platform to “allow the film to stay in cinemas as long as possible”. Another battle… As for Ali Abbasi, happy to have taken up the challenge brilliantly, he swears that, for his next production, he will return to the surreal worlds of his beginnings. “I will be able to give free rein to my creative fantasies, he confides. I think I’m starting to get tired of scrutinizing human darkness! »
