‘The Apprentice’ – about a young Trump – premieres in Cannes

CANNES, France (AP):

While Donald Trump’s hush money trial entered its sixth week in New York, a story for the Republican presidential candidate premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on Monday, unveiling a scathing portrait of the former president in the 1980s.

The Apprentice, directed by the Iranian Danish film-maker Ali Abbasi, stars Sebastian Stan as Trump. The central relationship of the movie is between Trump and Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), the defense attorney who was chief counsel to Joseph McCarthy’s 1950s Senate investigations.

Cohn is depicted as a longtime mentor to Trump, coaching him in the ruthlessness of New York City politics and business. Early on, Cohn aided the Trump Organisation when it was being sued by the federal government for racial discrimination in housing.

The Apprentice, which is described as inspired by true events, portrays Trump’s dealings with Cohn as a Faustian bargain that guided his rise as a businessman and, later, as a politician. Stan’s Trump is initially a more naive real-estate striver, soon transformed by Cohn’s education.

The film notably contains a scene depicting Trump raping his wife, Ivana Trump (played by Maria Bakalova). In Ivana Trump’s 1990 divorce deposition, she stated that Trump raped her. Trump denied the allegation, and Ivana Trump later said she didn’t mean it literally, but rather that she had felt violated.

That scene and others make The Apprentice a potentially explosive big-screen drama in the midst of the US presidential election. The film is for sale in Cannes, so it doesn’t yet have a release date.

In the press notes for the film, director Abbasi said: “This is not a biopic of Donald Trump. We’re not interested in every detail of his life going from A to Z. We’re interested in telling a very specific story through his relationship with Roy and Roy’s relationship with him.”

Regardless of its political impact, The Apprentice is likely to be much discussed as a potential awards contender. The film, shot in a gritty ‘80s aesthetic, returns Strong to a New York landscape of money and power a year following the conclusion of HBO’s Succession. Strong did not attend the Cannes premiere Monday.

The Apprentice is playing in competition in Cannes, making it eligible for the festival’s top award, the Palme d’Or.