The story of young Donald Trump, the boogie man
Now that New York’s star is a bit in decline, tarnished by the rise of Silicon Valley but also by a new mentality that does not believe that living in overpriced cubicles and being consumed by stressful work is coolit’s easier to believe the story of “The Apprentice: The origins of Trump”. A story where the fate of New York is saved by Donald Trumpcondemning the rest of the nation. The film by Iranian director Ali Abbasi is everything you wouldn’t imagine if someone told you about a Trump biopic. Starting from the Donald who says: no presidency (almost not even as an omen), no reality star profile, no orange skin, straw hair and arrogant attitude.
Written by .political journalist Gabriel Sherman his first screenplay for a feature film, “The Apprentice” tells the story of the lesser-known Trump, still stuck at the level preceding his pervasiveness of the American media and cultural world of the 80s and 90s, when he appeared in every blockbuster, in every TV series that was worth talking about, always in his own shoes.
We are in the 70s and we are in New York, in a New York far from the romantic or adrenaline-filled imagery of the cinema of the following decades. It is not (yet) the city to be, it is the city where you find yourself and try not to sink, The Big Apple seems like a losing bet, a metropolis lost between corruption and crime. This is not the case for the young Donald Trump, convinced that he can reverse its fortunes with astute but not too daring property speculation. So far it’s the same Trump as ever: the one who teaches how to do business on reality TV, the one from Trump Tower. “The Apprentice” was written starting in 2016, in the aftermath of the political elections won by the tycoon. As he and the United States took the measure of a pop billionaire in the Oval Office. It is not the first film to be written in the wake of that political shock for the US liberal left, but it is the first that it does not arise from surprise, amazement, anger. In fact, Sherman has interviewed Trump for years, on behalf of various newspapers, and has seen him grow from a person to a character.
In “The Apprentice” he tells it like a sort of Frankenstein monster, a creature that already has within itself the germ of everything that will be but which retains an embarrassment, an awkwardness, an insecurity, an underlying purity triggered for example by the ambivalent relationship with the father. The film tells the story the most classic of the parables of the bad teacher who molds a student so good that he surpasses him and destroys him. The master in question is the lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn, already central to another key work of American identity: “Angels in America”. Careerist, cynical, cruel and extremely unscrupulous, Roy takes Donald under his wing and teaches him what has been the basis of his success, economic and political: wanting power as such, always denying everything, playing to win.
If the parable is predictable – but no less heartbreaking – it is the narrative voice that further ruffles the cards. “The Apprentice” indeed.it doesn’t have the political bombast one would expect from an American film about the most controversial presidency din the last century and more.
This is because he is there to direct it a foreign and alien lookwho only really knows Trump and Cohn when the screenwriter tells him about them in a Zoom chat. Ali Abbasi was born in Iran, raised in Denmark, graduated in Architecture and passionate about philosophy. Unlike Adam McKay or Michael Moore, for him Trump is not such a personal matter, but one way among many of telling a liberal and capitalist US system to justify and legitimize the assumption that “the winner takes it all”. It is no coincidence that behind her direction Ivana Trump also carves out a nice space, bringing with her the point of view of someone who comes from outside this reality and assimilates it, yes, but is never really part of it in a proprietary way , identity. As often happens, the film works precisely because it tells a story whose arc we can predict, whose ending we know better than the protagonists, but which is presented with a distance, a detachment that gives rise to interesting considerations in their being more general, systemic.
Together with the 70s look but always somehow never refined, together with the grain of film shot on film, together with a perpetual golden photography, “The Apprentice” reconstructs this opulent but decadent and corrupt New York also with music. The film relies heavily on the music of the time, sinking its hands into that high, indeed very high, range of pieces that made history, which we would all be able to hum. These are the years of disco music, of Boogie Nights (the film is cited among the sources of inspiration together with “Barry Lyndon” by Stanley Kubrick). There disco music that is not as light and carefree as the dance music of the following decadebut it seems so because it has as a counterpart the committed, political music, the angry and scratched rock of the years of lead.
Turbulent years, violent years, which remain so under the luxurious glitter of the life that Trump slowly builds for himself. .
It’s all a boogie: let’s start with “I’m your boogie man” by KC and the Sunshine Bandthe confidence of a man who knows what he is worth at a time when the young Trump does not yet know how to dance well, he is unsure of his steps. Then comes Ivana Trump, who obviously knows how to dance, “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie” by Baccara. She is sure of herself, aware of her charm, like the persuasive voices of the duo who sing the song, introducing it with a series of sighs of pleasure. The song opens with that “Mister, your eyes are full of hesitation”. For both her and Roy, rivals for the attention and – ultimately – the heart of Donald, they will bitterly discover that having danced a different dance from the young manwho perhaps just doesn’t have that heart, not in the classic sense. He finally managed to do without it, to become the perfected, grotesque, sometimes monstrous version of the shark that Cohn had tried to become all his life, while remaining human. “The Apprentice” is in Italian cinemas from October 17th.