Underneath the veneer of convention of this biopic and its depiction of Donald Trump’s rise in the real estate world is hidden a more audacious genre film on Trump’s vampirism.
What could possibly have led Ali Abbasi, the Iranian director of the lovely fantasy film Border, to make The Apprentice, a film about Donald Trump’s rise in the real estate business? There are two films here. On the one hand, an unsurprising biography re-enacting key moments in the construction of the Trump empire, particularly stodgy when it comes to psychological clichés – Donald suffering from a lack of recognition from his father, for example – and clichés of form – the film aims for a stylistic edginess, a nonchalant irony that it tries to find but often ends up going over the top.
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On the other hand, there’s a much stranger story about Trump’s relationship to his lawyer Roy Cohn. From the start of the film, the experienced Cohn takes the young man under his wing and teaches him the ropes, ropes that will actually become the mainstays of Trumpism (the use of aggression as a political strategy, the questioning of single and absolute truths). The film recalls Abbasi’s early experiments with the genre. The interesting idea behind the film is that of genealogy. Where does Trump come from and what is he made of? Of Roy Cohn’s teachings, at least in part. The film shows how Trump, a true animal at work, sucks everything from his mentor and, after having absorbed everything, leaves him nearly lifeless, totally desiccated – Cohn weakens and eventually dies of AIDS. At the same time as he conquers New York real estate, Trump conques his lawyer’s body. After devouring the body, as if to conceal the crime, the entrepreneur will then resort to several cosmetic surgery procedures. Too tenuous and not polished enough to carry the whole film, what remains is this rather mad attempt to make Trump the figure of a modern vampire.
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