J Paul Johnson
He was a self-styled street fighting man, a violent thug charged and convicted of armed theft and tried for two murders. An intellectual and provocateur who became the darling of the French left. A posh and natty public figure fond of others’ attention and adoration. A writer whose memoir, composed in prison, captivated the public. He was at the epicenter of one of his country’s most memorable trials, one that became something far more than a mere discernment of innocence or guilt. Pierre Goldman was all of these and his trial captivated France in 1976, an episode recounted, with a modest degree of creative license and no shortage of dramatic and thematic heft, in The Goldman Case.
Cédric Kahn’s recounting of Goldman’s second trial, which held him charged of several armed thefts and the murder of two pharmacists, stars César-award winner Arieh Worthalter as Goldman and Arthur Harari (who co-won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay for Anatomy of a Fall) as his defense counselor. The approach here is both delimiting and intensifying, as Kahn eschews any distracting subplots, re-enactments, or narrative experiment to tell Goldman’s case, from the start of the trial to its verdict, without leaving the courtroom except for a few brief moments of dialogue between Goldman and his counselors in private. At nearly two hours of nothing but courtroom deliberations and testimony, such an approach might seem risky, but Kahn so deftly manages the ebb and flow of the trial the film makes for a riveting courtroom thriller.
Using a narrow-framed Academy aspect ratio, Kahn creates a crowded, claustrophobic courtroom, one that puts the unique character of the French judicial system itself on trial. The chief magistrate’s demand that each witness recount their own history negates any need for awkward exposition. The accused sits in full view of each witness and the gallery, and they he. Attorneys interrupt at any provocation, as do the sometimes-riotous members of the gallery, from the leftist students there to support Goldman to the police officers and witnesses eager to see him led behind bars. Kahn’s camera deftly captures testimony, reaction shots, and line-of-sight perspectives without ever giving into excessive movement or illogical placements: the film makes the complex seem simple, letting the case itself tell the story.
The case is fraught with tensions. Goldman acknowledges his guilt in a number of armed thefts. Yet he vigorously denies the murders of the pharmacists of which he is accused. The prosecution has multiple eyewitnesses and yet, each account is skewed by a palpable prejudice against Jews like Goldman, specifically, and ethnic “others” more generally. Goldman himself accuses the French police of overt systemic racism, which his lawyers are quick to discount, but the charge lingers and The Goldman Case soon becomes more than a mere trial of the accused’s guilt or innocence: rather, it is a French culture and society that has never fully integrated its Polish Jewish refugees and treated them, like other minorities, as less than its “real” citizens, sometimes covertly, sometimes overtly, but consistently with prejudice.
Worthalter is at the center of the film for most of its duration and is compelling as the accused, Goldman, a son of Polish Jewish refugees who became a dilettante revolutionary and—in so steadfastly maintaining his innocence—whose case became a cause célèbre. Worthalter’s Goldman is unpredictable and unrepentant, his willful directness posing problems for his legal team, yet his profession of his innocence in the charge of murder never wavers, nor does the actor’s steely gaze. There’s less room for other members of the cast to make an impression, but Harari is also excellent as his put-upon defender wrestling with his own identity as a Jew in an antisemitic state and legal system. As the prosecuting attorney, Nicolas Briançon is a formidable, if despicable, opponent, though his scenes are largely limited to a series of snarky objections and churlish cross-examinations.
Kahn’s primary sources for the script, co-written with Nathalie Hertzberg, are journalistic coverage of Goldman’s two trials, the accused’s book, Dim Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France (which he wrote while imprisoned and awaiting the second of his two trials), and interviews with Goldman’s friends and associates. It’s an approach that privileges Goldman’s perspective, certainly, yet it also allows for a sufficiently dramatic and multi-dimensional characterization of him and the trial that served to illustrate the complexity of Jewish identity in postwar Europe.
Goldman’s case divided the French: leftists heralded him the victim of a racist and corrupt regime while conservatives clamored for his conviction. In retrospect, the case’s display of an inherent antisemitism and racial prejudice is all too easy to see, especially in Kahn’s deft direction and Worthalter’s performance as a complex man whose identity is itself on trial. Together, these make The Goldman Case a compelling trial film not only for the past it depicts but the present on which it so clearly and unambiguously comments.
