Donald Trump's hands on the city

It is the movements of the mouth that are striking, that unconscious way of sucking in the lips to take time and concentrate, while the eyes narrow to a slit. Sebastian Stan's exceptional Trump (Best Actor at the Berlinale for A Different Man, formerly in Tonya and a Marvel World performer) poses in this way even as a young man, when he is still an 'apprentice', waiting to turn into the consummate politician we see battling with Kamala Harris, now down in the polls.

It is called The Apprentice. At the Origins of Trump the film in which Ali Abbasi recounts the first steps of a businessman about to disrupt the real estate market in 1970s New York to transform a crime-ridden Manhattan into a luxury hub. It is a biopic The Apprentice, but it is above all an argument about democracy in the most enviable and functioning check and balance democracy, even when an unelected president (Trump) does not accept the results and incites his own to take back power (Capitol Hill). After all, it was his deputy, Republican Mike Pence, who approved the request to send in the National Guard to oppose the rioters. Of democracy, or the absence of it, something Abbasi knows, having been born in Iran and not being able to return after filming Holy spider in 2022, inspired by the true story of an Iranian serial killer who went out at night to kill prostitutes in the silence of the investigation. An analysis of the necrosis that a regime inflicts on its own people, killing the primary drive towards freedom and justice. However, Abbasi also shows the contradictions of the United States, a country that has not known dictatorship, but where corruption and intimidation creep into unbridled liberalism, allowing figures such as the lawyer Roy Cohn, known as The Snake, to pollute the wells, amassing credits from the powers that be, after securing the espionage convictions against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and investigating suspected communists on behalf of Senator McCarthy. The fixer Cohn, played by a very impressive Jeremy Strong, takes it upon himself to act as a 'mentor' to the young and ambitious Donald, because he sees his unscrupulousness as a consensus-seeking free-rider. He teaches him three basic rules 1) Attack. Attack. Attack2) Admit nothing. Deny everything3) Declare victory and never admit defeat (this last precept the excellent pupil took to extremes).

Donald understands that not everything Cohn teaches him is permissible: he is, after all, a boy brought up in a middle-class family, a 'son of art' in business, despite proclaiming himself a self-made man, with a somewhat bigoted morality, which gives him an aura of primitive naivety and some granite principles, for example, always remaining abstemious. Often, when Roy teaches him how to achieve results through deception and intimidation, he sucks in his lips, but then overcomes any hesitation: he wants the green light to achieve shameless success, the rest is removal of obstacles. Paradoxically, the mundane (including Andy Warhol) and sexy-sensual (Ivana Trump is Maria Bakalova) aspects are the least interesting in the seductive videotape photography and Seventies costume philology. The director observes Trump without Manichaeism, as an animal with his own humanity (Cohn has it too), which is gradually devoured by the coveted identity, that of the billionaire tycoon. It paints him almost as a 'called' to a conservative vocation, God bless America, in front of which no code of ethics (r)exists. In the opposite, but for that matter similar, direction, Abbasi had filmed in 2018 a shocking sci-fi, Border, about a creature, employed at customs, infallible in finding crooks simply by sniffing out the illicit.

Writing The apprentice was Gabriel Sherman, a political journalist and expert on the American right. Sherman had been interviewing Trump since the beginning of his career and he came up with the idea of illuminating the tycoon through his relationship with the man who was his personal lawyer from 1973 to 1985, identifying among the winning tactics he learned, that of manipulating the press, of 'making news' as a way to gain power. The film has struggled to find producers (and was born thanks to a fundraising campaign) and distributors in America, where it has been in cinemas since 11 October. So far it has grossed little, but perhaps Trump's own statements about the film 'A false and classless film. A low blow, defamatory, politically disgusting', might revive the box office.