What does the US presidential election campaign and the ongoing Cannes film festival have in common? The answer is Donald Trump. On Monday (20 May), The Apprentice , the story of the 45th US president’s early years as a real estate developer, earned an eight-minute standing ovation after it premiered at the Grand Theatre Lumiere. While it received high praise and a lengthy standing ovation in the French Riviera, the movie has earned the wrath of the former US president, calling it “malicious defamation” and threatening legal action.
What’s the movie about? The Apprentice , a reference to the TV series Donald Trump fronted in the early 2000s, is a movie based on the former US president’s early years while he was making his name in real estate. The movie starts off with a disclaimer that many of its events are fictionalised. Directed by Ali Abbasi and written by the author Gabriel Sherman, the movie stars Sebastian Stan (famous for playing Winter Soldier in The Avengers franchise) as Trump, who is seeking to establish himself as a real estate magnate in the US.
He finds a mentor in the wily lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) and a first wife in the fashion model Ivana Zelnickova (Maria Bakalova). The movie depicts how Cohn’s lessons such as “admit nothing, deny everything” and “attack, attack, attack” become Trump’s motto in later life. News agency AFP says the film “paints an unflinching but nuanced portrait of the former US president”.
The movie that sh.
