“There is no nice metaphorical way to address the rising tide of fascism. There is only the messy path. There is only the banal way. There is only the way to confront this wave on its own terms, at its own level, and it’s not going to be pleasant. I think the problem with the world is that good people have been silent for too long. So, I think it’s time to make relevant films. It’s time to make movies political again“, claimed in an openly explicit manner during the press conference held on Saturday night, the filmmaker Ali Abbasiafter the presentation at the Cannes Festival of your new jobnot without controversy, “The Apprentice” (“The Apprentice”).
“There is no nice metaphorical way to address the rising tide of fascism”
The film, as detailed in detail in The Hollywood Reporter, explores the rise of donald trump to power in 1980s America under the influence of firebrand right-wing lawyer Roy Cohn. Sebastian Stan plays on this occasion a young version of the real estate magnate in his days before the famous MAGA (slogan popularized by Trump in his 2016 presidential campaign that literally alludes to “Make America Great Again” or “Make the United States Great Again”), while “Succession” star Jeremy Strong stars as Cohn, alongside Martin Donovan (“Tenet”) as Mr. Fred Trump and Oscar nominee Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump. But it also contains “several disturbing and deeply unflattering scenes,” including a sequence in which he rapes his first wife Ivanaundergoes liposuction and surgery for his bald head, becomes addicted to diet pills and betrays the trust of many of his close people.
Aware of the shadow of retaliation that this premiere could provoke, the also author of the extraordinary “Holy Spider” and the shocking “Border”, responded to the threat of a lawsuit from Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung with irony and calm: “Everyone talks about him suing a lot of people; they don’t talk about his success rate, though, you know?” The director further speculated on the former president’s likely assumptions about the film, saying: “If I were him, I’d be sitting in New Jersey or Florida or wherever he is now, or in New York, and I’d be thinking, ‘Oh, this crazy Iranian and some liberal bastards in Cannes, got together and made this movie that’s fucking with me.”
Before assuring in closing that he would be happy to screen the film for Trump and discuss it with him, he stated that “I don’t necessarily think he would like it. I think he would be surprised, you know? And like I said before, I would offer to go meet with him wherever he wants and talk about the context of the film, have a chat about the screening and a chat afterward, if that’s interesting to someone in the Trump campaign.”
