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Donald Trump is the talk of the Cannes Film Festival, although not for positive reasons.
After its screening at Cannes on Monday, filmmaker Ali Abbasi’s movie “The Apprentice” has the cinema community buzzing and the Trump campaign fuming. The biopic focuses on the relationship between Trump and his now-deceased former lawyer Roy Cohn. Cohn’s character is played by Jeremy Strong, who starred as Kendall Roy in “Succession,” and Trump’s character is played by Sebastian Stan, who previously appeared in Marvel's “Avengers” franchise and once starred as rocker Tommy Lee in a biopic about Lee and model Pamela Anderson.
Among the aspects that have the MAGA camp up in arms is the inclusion of a scene in which the Trump character sexually assaults a character playing Trump’s then-wife, Ivana Trump.
As The Associated Press reports:
“The Apprentice,” which is labeled as inspired by true events, ... notably contains a scene depicting Trump raping his wife, Ivana Trump (played by Maria Bakalova). In Ivana Trump’s 1990 divorce deposition, she stated that Trump raped her. Trump denied the allegation and Ivana Trump later said she didn’t mean it literally, but rather that she had felt violated. That scene and others make “The Apprentice” a potentially explosive big-screen drama in the midst of the U.S. presidential election. The film is for sale in Cannes, so it doesn’t yet have a release date.
Variety reports that the film also “features a slew of unflattering scenes depicting Trump popping amphetamine pills, getting liposuction, having surgery to remove his bald spot.”
Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung told the AP the film “is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked,” and he said a lawsuit would be filed “to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers.” And in a statement to Variety, he called the film “election interference by Hollywood elites.”
Abbasi, the director, mocked the legal threat.
“Everybody talks about him suing a lot of people — they don’t talk about his success rate though, you know?” he told reporters, according to the AP. He also offered Trump and his campaign a chance to screen the film and host a discussion afterward.
In comments to the audience after the screening, Abbasi made it clear his film is meant to speak to the current political moment:
There is no nice metaphorical way to deal with the rising wave of fascism. There’s only the messy way. There’s only the the banal way. There’s only the way of dealing with this wave on its own terms, at its own level and it’s not going to be pretty, but I think the problem with the world is that the good people have been quiet for too long. So, I think it’s time to make movies relevant. It’s time to make movies political again.”
It's rich that Team Trump is trying to cast this film as "election interference." Coming from a man who literally tried to interfere in his last election, those claims ring hollow.