‘The Goldman Case Review: A Stark, Gripping Courtroom Drama Tackling French Injustice

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Along with Alice Diop's The Holy Omer , which won the Venice Silver Lion last year, and Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall , premiering in Cannes next week, Cédric Kahn's The Goldman Affair heralds the trend and is the final installment in the space drama . which, with a few exceptions (such as Henri-Georges Clouzot's rarely seen masterpiece "Believe "), has never been a central aspect of French cinema.

In fact, unlike American courts, French courts tend to be less dramatic, with fewer jury decisions (except in murder cases) and judges playing a larger role in trials, dryly dealing with facts and allegations. However, a number of high-profile trials in France in recent years, including that of former President Nicolas Sarkozy for electoral fraud and another in connection with the November 13 attacks, have brought audiences back into the public eye. . . .

Like Diop's excellent film, Kahn's film is based on true events. In fact, the entire Goldman case takes place in the courtroom, with the exception of the opening scene, which takes place in the office of the defendant's attorney, Maitre Kaman (Arthur Harari, directed by Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Woods ). It evokes the scenery of a play, making the director's earlier verbal works, such as Drita e Quqe and Lutja , more visual and lyrical.

But The Goldman Case is no ordinary game either. Of course, there is some tension when defendant Pierre Goldman (Arie Worthalter), a left-wing extremist who has committed multiple robberies and is accused of murdering two pharmacists, is acquitted. But as the trial progressed, it became perfectly clear, at least to us, that the man was innocent. So the question is whether the French state will really let him go.

The film is set in 1975, at a time when crime was sometimes associated with left-wing extremism in Europe (the Baader-Meinhof group, the Red Brigades) and the United States (The Weather Underground). political court. Kahn, who co-wrote the screenplay with Natalie Herzberg, was inspired to create the film after reading the defendant's autobiography , Vague Memoirs of a Polish Jew Born in France , which Goldman wrote in prison and considered him a hero intellectuals made. His trial brought together many journalists as well as the philosopher Régis Debret and the actress Simone Signoret (played as a double in the film) and after May 1968 became a famous case against the government, particularly against the criminal justice system. . , against the left.

During the course of the film, Kahn repeatedly invokes the prejudices of the French police, who, without any solid evidence, accuse Goldman of being the perpetrator of the pharmacy murders. In fact, their only key witness is an off-duty police officer (Paul Jeanson) who was shot while trying to escape from his assailant and never got to his story. Another witness, Goldman's friend from the West Indies (Maxim Chibangu), claims the police forced him to testify against him.

At first, the vocal and volatile Goldman confessed to a few thefts but no murders and was so confident we believed him. He interrupts both his lawyers and the fanatical prosecutor Maitre Garo (Nicolas Briançon), using his trial as a platform to attack the police and the state whenever possible. With a courtroom full of leftists, he has made the stand his stand and denounced a country that remains racist, anti-Semitic and unjust.

Perhaps best known for his role in Lucas Don't's The Daughter , the Franco-Belgian actor Worthalter takes your breath away every time his character takes a stand. He convinced us of Goldman's innocence, not to mention his commitment to the political cause, well before the end of the trial, and we hope the jury will agree with us. To support the defendant's testimony, we also hear from Goldman's father (Jerzy Radziwiłowicz), a Jewish war hero who raised his son to fight against the oppressors at an early age and encouraged him to later engage in left-wing activities, including as a partisan in Venezuela . .

That's not to say Goldman has always been a good citizen — he admits to being a criminal and an alcoholic — but his honesty, including the mistakes he's made in the past, makes up for his apparent shortcomings. It also helps that the defendant has such a passionate, poetic way of speaking out loud: "I'm innocent because I'm innocent," he declared at one point, refusing to provide any further details or evidence because that's a compliance were . the law. wrong to him.

What really ties the Goldman case to Saint-Omer is the use of courtroom drama to focus the camera on France's injustice. For Diop it was an exploration of latent racism in his own country and for Kahn it was the anti-left and anti-Semitic tendencies of the 1970s, tendencies that have found a new voice in the current resurgence of the far right. French. "Jews and blacks are one and the same," says Goldman in one of his many outbursts, and while it may seem exaggerated, it reveals an uncomfortable truth about the discrimination in France that this haunting film bears witness to.

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