There was a time when Donald Trump was not an unscrupulous far-right, but a loser. It was at the beginning of the 70s, that decade of key bifurcation to understand the present of a neoliberalism in the process of putrefaction. The Iranian director Ali Abbasi focuses on portraying New York in crisis fifty years ago to understand the creation as a monster – in the literal sense – of the former American president’s business and politics. That’s what it’s about The Apprentice. Abbasi’s film, which was presented at the 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, will be talked about in the coming months, marked by the presidential campaign in the United States.
The premiere of biopic on Trump has coincided in the second week of the contest with the out-of-competition presentation of Lula, by Oliver Stone. The American director continues his frenetic pace and dedicates this documentary to another of the leaders who dared to question the hegemony of American imperialism. After his controversial works on Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chávez, he now reviews the career of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Siva, one of the most charismatic left-wing leaders in this 21st century and victim of a case of lawfare manual.
The veteran Stone, 78 years old, has now left behind his years of glory, in which he achieved excellence with Platoon and savior and now he is almost retired who uses his fame to do whatever he wants. That is noticeable in Lula, shallow and too pamphletary as an audiovisual work. Despite this, it has a good half hour in which it describes in detail Lava Jato, the corruption case used to imprison the Brazilian president without evidence in 2018, in addition to facilitating the victory of the far-right Jair Bolsonaro.
The genesis of Trump and the attempt to politically kill Lula represent two different sides of the same framework
The viewing of Lula earns interest if done in parallel with The Apprentice. The genesis of Trump and the attempt to politically kill the left-wing Brazilian president represent two different faces of the same corrupt and immoral network, with a systemic dimension.
Roy Cohn, the mafia lawyer who catapulted Trump
“This is not a film about Trump, but about a system and the way the people who dominate it take advantage of it,” Abbasi, 43, explained at the press conference after the film’s presentation. After his award-winning Border and Holy Spider –both were awarded at the Cannes editions in 2018 and 2022–, this Iranian filmmaker, exiled in Denmark, is now established as one of the most relevant names on the current scene. Beyond the noise, guaranteed by talking about the Republican Party candidate, The Apprentice makes a series of successful artistic bets that have placed it above the average of what has been seen so far in Cannes.
His greatest success is the decision not to be harsh with moral judgments about Trump. Progressives have been laughing at this ineffable character since 2016, but there are the polls that continue to show him as the winner on November 5. Instead of facile parody, Abbasi opts to dissect his life between the early seventies and the late eighties. It does so based on the meeting between a young Trump, played by Sebastian Stan – who was already awarded in February at the Berlinale – and one of his mentors: the lawyer Roy Cohn, played on screen by Jeremy Strong, one of the best performances. masculine seen at the pageant.
The film shows the general public this key figure of Trumpism. This mafia-like and aggressive lawyer gives Trump the keys to move in the jungle of the New York elites. He “Attacks, attacks, attacks” in court; “you always have to deny everything”; and “in case you lose, never accept defeat.” It is the triple formula that Cohn shares with his disciple. Both on screen and in reality, the mentor of the perhaps future president worked for Italian bosses such as Tony Salerno or Paul Castellano. Although it is a fictional character, it is very plausible compared to his real namesake thanks to a very well documented script, prepared by journalist Gabriel Sherman, from the magazine Vanity Fair.
Trump and Cohn met at the Club nightclub. There the future tycoon – then a young, foolish father’s son who is dedicated to collecting rent for the family business – contacts the lawyer to confront the well-founded accusations that African Americans were not welcome in Trump. Village, in Brooklyn. From that real episode, well portrayed in the opening sequence, a Frankenstein-style relationship begins. Cohn molds Trump into a selfish, unscrupulous guy who disregards the law and the truth. The tycoon’s immorality ends up devouring his creator. The protagonist’s only principle is summarized in this phrase: “Everyone wants to suck a winner.”
Trump and Judge Sergio Moro, two products of the system
To accompany the story of this duo, to which is added the character of Ivana Trump (the first of his wives, played on screen by Maria Bakalova), Abbasi uses archive images with which he illustrates the crisis in the seventies in the United States. (war in Vietnam, oil shock…), as well as the victory of Ronald Reagan and the beginning of the hegemony of the neoliberal casino in the eighties, also marked by the ravages of AIDS. Egoism and death go hand in hand.
With his desire to take those in power down from their pedestal, the Iranian director describes Trump as an ordinary
The Apprentice is right to show the links between Trumpism and Reaganism. Trump is not a outsider –as the general press has erroneously presented it–, but a pure product of the system. With his desire to take those in power down from their pedestal, the Iranian director describes the tycoon as anyone. He is a nobody who had the ability to surround himself with guys smarter and more astute than him who put themselves at his service. Abbasi shows it with a staging that is reminiscent of the television series of yesteryear. In the rise of the tycoon, the border between what is true and what is false becomes blurred.
Judge Sergio Moro also appears as a pure product of the system in the documentary Lula. In the most recommendable part of this unassuming film, Stone dissects the investigation into the Petrobras corruption case that degenerated into a plot to oust the Workers’ Party from power. The investigating judge Moro (later Minister of Justice under Bolsonaro) played a predominant role. To the point that the director of Lula presents him as the most important leader of Bolsonarism, even more than the former president himself. And he is right.
“Moro is not a centrist, but an extreme rightist,” Lula assures in Stone’s interview with him. Perhaps Moro began the Lava Jato investigation with the noble intention of combating corruption. But over the years he became a master piece of a judicial, political and media plot. Globo’s audiovisual empire exalted him as the defender of the rule of law, when in reality he was behind an operation of lawfare. Lawyer and journalist Glenn Greenwald, former director of the digital The Intercept that Lava Jato revealed, recalls the presence of the tentacles of the North American Department of Justice in that plot. “There is no doubt about the intervention of the United States,” says the current president of Brazil.
In another interview, the hacker Walter Delgatti is seen. He was key to revealing Lava Jato thanks to a fortuitous event. He hacked the Telegram account of a prosecutor who had convicted him and thus discovered the raw material of that plot, which he put at the service of reporters from The Intercept. While The Apprentice moves on the blurred border between truth and lies, Lula It does so on the fragile wire of the triumph or failure of democracy. Truth, lies and democracy. A triad very present in two interesting political films that have been presented at Cannes. And they gain interest if they are seen as one.
