Festival de Cannes 2024, The Apprentice and The Shrouds

The Apprentice ©YesICannes.com

The Festival de Cannes presented Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice and David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, starring Diane Kruger and Vincent Cassel.

The Shrouds team ©YesICannes.com

Festival de Cannes 2024 : the festival enters its second half with the screenings of Ali Abbasi‘s The Apprentice, a biopic about the former (and perhaps future) President of the United States Donald Trump, which is said to have received an eleven-minute standing ovation, and David Cronenberg‘s The Shrouds, his twenty-third feature film.

The Shrouds ©DR

The Shrouds, cinema of cemeteries

After his surgical self-exploration of the human body from an agonising and monstrous angle in Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg, who won the Special Jury Prize at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival for Crash, is back in competition with The Shrouds. The Canadian director, actor, producer and screenwriter takes us into the world of cemeteries, using digital shrouds to watch bodies decompose in their graves. His hero, Karsh (Vincent Cassel), invents GraveTech, a cinematic process for corrupting the body, a cinema of cemeteries, where ghosts appear, human beings after death with whom their (living) loved ones can communicate. But now graves are being desecrated…

The Apprentice ©Profile Pictures

The apprentice businessman surpasses his father

Everyone still has in mind the spellbinding The Nights of Mashhad by Ali Abbasi, a Danish director of Iranian origin, presented in official competition at the Cannes 2022 Festival, which won the Best Actress prize for Zar Amir Ebrahimi. The film, in which a journalist investigates the murder of several prostitutes and confronts Islamic Iranian society, has been selected to represent Denmark in the race for the Oscar for Best International Film at the 95th Academy Awards. The Apprentice depicts Donald Trump’s rise in New York high society in the 1970s and 1980s as a real estate tycoon. Taking over the family business from his father, Donald Trump became a powerful businessman thanks to the support he received from lawyer Roy Cohn, who played a key role in his career.

©Profile Pictures

Disdain for the dignity of those closest to him

In Ali Abbasi’s portrait, everyone will find something to praise or detest Donald Trump, according to their own sensibilities. The apprentice who begs Roy Cohn for favours turns out to be ungrateful later, once his mentor’s illness has taken its toll. Fans of capitalism will find his initiative and his vision of money-making opportunities brilliant, while others will condemn his outspokenness, his disdain for the dignity of those closest to him and his coldness towards his wife Ivana (who died in 2022) when he admits that she no longer inspires any desire in him. In one shocking scene, he even rapes his wife Ivana, whom he had earlier reproached for her “plastic” breasts.

©Profile Pictures

Make Trump great again…

This film, which comes out in the middle of the American election year, painting a half-tone portrait – inspired by a reality TV show – of the former President of the United States from 2017 to 2021, who will be the first to have to answer for his actions in a criminal trial, carries a message: Donald Trump never acknowledges his faults, never admits defeat but turns it into victory, and that would come from the rules taught to him by Roy Cohn… Alongside Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) Sebastian Stan looks more and more like Donald Trump throughout the film. A remarkable biopic that is already making waves: Steven Cheung, spokesman for the Trump campaign, has described the film as “rubbish”, “sensationalising lies”. But when it comes to politics at the Cannes Film Festival, with its worldwide media impact, you have to be circumspect…