‘The Apprentice’ at Cannes: The controversy around Trump film showing him raping his wife, getting liposuction

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 shows Trump as a “striver” has, however, a lot to upset his supporters. At one point during the film, he is shown raping Ivana inside their apartment at Trump Tower. During their real-life divorce proceedings, Ivana had accused Trump of raping her, although she later retracted the allegation. She died in 2022 .

In the rape scene, which has stirred controversy, Bakalova (Ivana) is shown presenting a book to him about the female anatomy. However, the discussion turns dark and Stan (Trump) is then shown saying that he is no longer attracted to her. They argue and then Trump throws her to the ground and rapes her.

The movie also shows Trump abusing amphetamines in order to lose weight, and undergoing liposuction surgery to lose his love handles. Moreover, a young Trump in the movie is shown as making deals with underworld figures so Trump Tower can move forward as planned and failing to pay bills and making a bad bet on a Jersey City casino.

How Trump has reacted?

While Variety reported that the movie received a great response at Cannes with an eight-minute-long standing ovation, Trump’s campaign is seething.

Trump’s campaign communications director Steven Cheung said legal action would be taken “to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers”.

“This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalises lies that have been long debunked,” he added in a statement. “This is election interference by Hollywood elites, who know that President Trump will retake the White House and beat their candidate of choice because nothing they have done has worked.”

And it’s not just Trump’s campaign that is threatening legal action against the movie. Billionaire and Donald Trump supporter Dan Snyder is also furious with the movie. For those unaware, Snyder donated $1.1 million to Trump’s 2016 campaign and $100,000 to his 2020 campaign. He also poured money into The Apprentice through production house Kinematics, thinking the movie would depict his buddy in a positive light.

However, as Variety reports, when Snyder finally saw a cut of the film in February, he was said to be furious. “Kinematics’ lawyers were enlisted to fight the release of The Apprentice, and the cease-and-desist letters began flying.”

Kinematics president Emanuel Nuñez confirmed to Variety that his company had tried to stop the release but that it was a result of creative disagreements between the company and the filmmakers and had nothing to do with Snyder.

How has the film’s director defended his work?

Director Ali Abbasi said, “I don’t think it is a movie he would dislike. “I don’t necessarily think he would like it, but I think he’d be surprised. So I’m happy to meet him, have a screening and then we can discuss it afterwards.”

He also hoped that the film would hit theatres in mid-September, ahead of a November US election that Trump, 77, is contesting as Republican presidential candidate.

A Reuters report also quoted Abbasi as saying, “Everybody talks about him suing a lot of people, they don’t talk about his success rate though.”

Speaking to Washington Post later, Abbasi said: “He’s a complex character. I think anyone who thinks Donald Trump is stupid or banal or superficial is gravely mistaken. I think a lot of my liberal friends think that because he doesn’t speak as eloquently as Barack Obama, he’s dumb and he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

He continued: “He has a very intuitive, actual ability to understand the masses. The Donald Trump in the movie is a construct, you know? I can call it a persona. And I can’t say that I decoded him.”

How has the movie been received?

Critics who were at the screening of The Apprentice at Cannes have given it broadly positive reviews.

Kevin Maher, writing for The Times, said: “This is the Donald Trump movie that you never knew you needed: full of compassionate feeling yet ruthless in analysis.”

Variety in its review wrote, “Sebastian Stan plays Donald Trump in a docudrama that nails everything about him but his mystery”.

Deadline’s Pete Hammond described it as “a smart, sharp and surprising origin story”. “This is not a hit job on Trump,” he said. “It presents a person somewhat driven but awkward, a man striving for the approval of a tough-love father, unsure but determined to succeed and even oddly charming at times.”

With inputs from agencies