The Goldman Case (Le procès Goldman, France 2023)

Most of us in the anglophone world know little about some of the major events in French public life. This film is based on the case of Pierre Goldman, a left-wing activist (a revolutionary in his own terms) who was arrested, convicted and imprisoned for life for four armed robberies in 1969-1970. The film focuses on a retrial in 1976 when Goldman proclaimed his innocence in regard to two women who were shot dead in one of the robberies at a pharmacy. The court hearing was big news in France. Goldman had written a book about himself and what happened to him entitled Souvenirs obscurs d’un juif polonais né en France (Obscure Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France) and this was published in 1975. Cédric Kahn, the French actor and director read the book “about fifteen years ago” (according to the interview in the Press Notes). He was intrigued by Goldman’s “extraordinary use of language. His style, his dialectic, his thought process”. Rather than attempt a biopic he decided to focus on the retrial and recruited Nathalie Herzberg as his co-writer. She pieced together everything she could find about the two trials, reconstructing what was said in court from newspaper reports. The pair then wrote a script drawing on both trials, extracts from the book and what was learned after the trial. Kahn suggests: “We took a lot of liberties, but at the same time, we were very faithful”. The result is a fictionalised version of the retrial.

The decisions taken by Moonshaker Productions were key to the look and ‘feel’ of the courtroom drama. The set was built on a tennis court with a glass roof to allow scenes to be shot with natural light. Three cameras under the control of DoP Patrick Ghiringhelli (whose work is displayed in two recent films by Dominik Moll) covered each scene which was on average shot twenty or thirty times to make sure everything was captured. This faced Kahn and veteran editor Yann Dedet with hours of work but proved to be key in creating the narrative. The other decisions taken involved finding experienced actors who were not major stars and wouldn’t create expectations via their star personae. This worked spectacularly well in respect of Arieh Worthalter who plays Pierre Goldman, winning several awards including the César for Best Male Actor. The ‘extras’ in the cast who made up the distinct groups in the courtroom – the supporters of Goldman, the police officers, the jury members etc. were also less familiar actors and the film was shot chronologically with the actors unaware of what was in the next part of the script and therefore reacting to events as they unfold. This is a familiar device used in the UK by Ken Loach in particular. Goldman was married to a woman from Guadeloupe and some actors were drawn from a French Caribbean theatre company in Paris. Goldman’s father in the film is played by Jerzy Radziwilowicz, best known in the West as Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble (Poland 1977) and Man of Iron (1981), offering a kind of cinematic authenticity to the figure of a Polish hero.

There is no music score and no expressionist camerawork or lighting. Apart from a couple of brief scenes everything is focused on the courtroom without distraction. If this sounds like a dull watch for 115 minutes, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Kahn focuses on the rhetoric in court, the intense questioning and grand statements by advocates plus a charismatic performance from Arieh Worthalter and many of the other main characters. The discourse is thematically very rich. There is an ongoing struggle between Goldman and his own counsel, Maître Kiejman (Arthur Harari). Harari was a writer on the courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall (France 2023) and also a supporting actor in the same film. Here he plays a brilliant young lawyer with the same Polish Jewish background as Goldman but with a very different ideological position. This means that though he is committed to defending Goldman, he has a different manner which Goldman rejects. In the early 1970s in France the Communist Jewish background of Goldman attracts considerable interest both from anti-semites and anti-communists as well as defenders of both identities. At the beginning of the narrative we get a glimpse of an actor identified as playing Simone Signoret and the cross examination of Goldman reveals that Régis Debray was a possible Goldman associate when he taught at the University of Havana.

The second strong theme of the court proceedings is the behaviour of the police involved in Goldman’s arrest and interrogation. Goldman directly asserts, very loudly, that they are fascists and racists. Kiejman also attacks them but in a more calm and analytical way, arguing that there might be individual police officers who are racist, but not suggesting that policing is institutionally racist. This same question arises in relation to other racial identities with real questions about what it means to be dark-skinned, looking like an Arab or a ‘Mediterranean type’ etc. Goldman again makes the point that the Jew is like the Negro in terms of police treatment. As many commentators have pointed out these issues from the early 1970s seem to still be very relevant in contemporary European societies. We might add to this the role of the media with Goldman becoming a kind of media star because of his outbursts in the courtroom.

Like Anatomy of a Fall, Saint Omer (France 2022), The Girl With a Bracelet (France-Belgium 2019) and a much earlier film like Special Section (France-Italy-West Germany 1975) by Costa-Gavras, the courtroom proceedings in French trials can be baffling to British and American audiences and anyone else used to judicial processes derived from English Common Law. The Goldman Case does however seem extreme compared to the other four films referenced here. Because of the filming and editing techniques employed by Kahn and his team, the audience is rather like a juror sat in the courtroom trying to follow an intense series of arguments with a prosecutor as as loud and assertive in his claims as Goldman himself plus the groups of spectator supporters of Goldman, the police, Caribbean and Jewish communities. The president strives to keep control but is sometimes helpless.

I found the narrative to be impelling though it did seem at points that the whole presentation was in danger of getting out of hand. I remembered a film I didn’t fully understand, A Gentle Creature (Ukraine 2017) which includes a form of Russian ‘show trial’ appearing in a dream sequence and played out almost as farce. Again I was reminded of the Orson Welles version of Kafka’s The Trial (France 1962). I mention these two films because, although they are very different and not even set in France or with a realist aesthetic, do deal with the idea of the accused as persecuted for ideological reasons. Goldman is a man who may well be guilty but is also a Jewish, left-wing figure seemingly being tried for who he is as much as for what he may have done. I still remember my school history lessons about the Dreyfus case during the Third Republic in the 1890s and the anti-semitism at that time. The Goldman Case is for me universalist in its relevance but I worry that it won’t be widely seen in the UK/US. In the UK it opened on 43 screens in a release by Met Film Distribution, a new name for me, scoring a screen average of £649, not bad in the current market but unlikely to to signal a long stay in cinemas. I’d like to add just one more reference. The events in the film took place at around the same time as the Mangrove Trial in the UK as explored in Steve McQueen’s first film of his Small Axe series (UK 2020). A different legal system and a different aesthetic but similarities in the issues at stake. It would be interesting to programme them together in a short season. The Goldman Case is presented in Academy ratio and Mangrove in ‘Scope, one of several differences, but both engaged me intellectually as well as emotionally and politically. Do take a punt on The Goldman Case if you get the chance (and check out the McQueen if you haven’t already seen it).