Courtroom dramas are a mainstay of the moving picture landscape. Right from the classics of the genre to the present day, they regularly depict morally upstanding participants attempting to overturn unlikely odds in the name of that murkiest of concepts, justice. Cedric Kahn’s absorbing new drama The Goldman Case, which was the opening film of the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, thoroughly embraces the tradition’s knottier aspects. Based on a real-life case from France in the 1970s, the film depicts the trial of Pierre Goldman, using this single event as a way to study both a complicated and contradictory life and an equally inconsistent criminal justice system. Built around a virtuoso lead performance from Arieh Worthalter, it’s a gripping dialogue-heavy drama that is also a multivalent rumination on revolution, racism, disenfranchisement, and integrity.
In December of 1969, a hold-up at a pharmacy in Paris resulted in two employees being killed before the assailant escaped. Goldman, a leftist agitator-cum-petty gangster, was charged with the crime along with several other armed robberies that occurred around the same period. He plead guilty to most of the charges but vehemently denied the pharmacy job and the associated murders, even after being convicted and sentenced to life in prison. In 1975, his book Obscure Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France, which he had written while incarcerated, was published and detailed a multitude of flaws in the case against him. With Goldman’s plight already a cause celebre, the furore surrounding the book led to an appeal that, in turn, resulted in a second trial beginning in April of 1976. This is where Cedric Kahn and Nathalie Hertzberg’s screenplay begins, as final preparations are being made to mount Goldman’s second attempt at acquittal for murder.
The film is a like a biopic shorn of all extraneous material. Goldman’s life was one filled with peaks and troughs – from radical political zeal to miniature workaday catastrophes – and his trial was a moment in which so much that sees him remain a fascinating character half a century later coalesces into a legal and philosophical supernova. As such, the filmmakers’ decision to strip away the fat leaves the production feeling incredibly lean and incisive even in a two-hour film that builds slowly and touches on a variety of nebulous, interlinking thematic subjects. The single scene set outside the confines of the courthouse is the opening one, in which Goldman’s lead defence attorney, Georges Kiejman (Arthur Harari), is informed he’s been fired just a week before the trial. His colleague Francis Chouraqui (Jeremy Lewin) convinces him to stay on, but the stage is here set for a trial in which Goldman himself (Worthalter) acts as primary interlocutor, and casts him as a demanding and difficult defendant.
The containment of the remaining action in the court building feels like a deliberate effort to remove the typical emotional entanglements that surround dramas of this nature. There are no flashbacks or re-enactments of the events of December 1969, there are no subplots in which investigators follow imperative leads, and there are no scenes detailing the strain the case is putting on Kiejman and his home life. Patrick Ghiringhelli’s photography is unfussy and hued solely by cool, bright daylight – there is no music inserted to manipulate the viewers’ feelings. To all intents and purposes, the audience is placed in the position of the jury members – asked to observe the interactions between court officials, witnesses, and the respondent, and reach their own conclusions.
Determined to defend himself with relatively little interference from his solicitors, Goldman gives lengthy erudite explanations of his life in a Polish immigrant family that fled the Holocaust and a history of armed struggle in places like Bolivia. He launches tirades against a police force he sees as endemically prejudiced against Jewish people like himself and those of Caribbean heritage he is friends with. He is also adamant that calling character witnesses is facile and contravenes the demands of justice; he admits to being an unscrupulous man who committed three other crimes but maintains that his innocence should only be judged on whether he killed two people. Through these sometimes-unexpected lines of enquiry, the film creates an intricate portrait both of the France of the period and, at various points, the present. The fact that the entire cases for and against rest on individual accounts and circumstantial evidence mean that the exercise ultimately comes down to logical circuities and the persuasiveness of the speakers. The ideological discourse that would, in other courtroom dramas, be immaterial becomes the crucial, tangible centre of the debate.
This is where Worthalter’s value becomes gloriously evident – he is magnetic in the role. His Pierre Goldman is at once intellectually exacting and at the mercy of his volatile emotions. His charisma is undeniable and while the film goes to pains to make sure challenges are made to the reliability of both those who are adamant about his guilt and those who protest his innocence, it is difficult not to hope he is acquitted. The actor’s performance is one of heightened intensity that veers between a moral philosopher, court jester, and hardened revolutionary in the blink of an eye and although he excels in moments of weakness – such as in reflecting upon the testimony of his father, a veteran of the French military – he also delivers instances of vitriol fiery enough to suggest he would be capable of losing his head and pulling a trigger in anger. It’s a difficult line to walk, and Worthalter not only does it with aplomb but with a suggestion of unfathomable depths behind his flinty eyes.
Director: Cedric Kahn
Cast: Arieh Worthalter, Arthur Harari, Stephan Guerin-Tillie, Chloe Lecerf
Producer: Benjamin Elalouf
Screenplay: Cedric Kahn, Nathalie Hertzberg
Cinematography: Patrick Ghiringhelli
Editing: Yann Dedet
Sound: Erwan Kerzanet, Sylvain Malbrant, Olivier Guillaume
Production design: Guillaume Deviercy
Production companies: Moonshaker (France)
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Quinzaine de cineastes)
In French
116 minutes
