‘The Goldman Case’: Cannes Review

Dir. Cedric Kahn. France. 2023. 116mins

The Goldman Case starts outside a courtroom, but even this single ‘exterior’ sequence is shot in a confined space. The volatile Pierre Goldman (Ariel Worthalter) has written a letter attempting to fire his lead counsel Georges Kiejman (Arthur Harari) a week before his re-trial in 1975 for armed robbery and the murder of two pharmacists in Paris. Cedric Kahn wastes no time setting the lines of his increasingly tense and fractious film – a court case and two French-born Polish Jews of modest heritage in post-Holocaust France, one who plays by the rules and one who is a law onto himself. Fast-fire dialogue and exceptional acting, the type of writing and performances that can carry a film set in an ugly brown box, should see this Directors Fortnight opening film into further festival and specialised play.

Worthalter is magnetic as the mercurial Goldman

As Kahn’s camera moves directly to the courtroom and we glimpse the former revolutionary Goldman for the first time, the ground is laid for a picture of a country still reeling from the all that has gone before – and a generation of French Jews who came of age after the War, born to parents who lived through the terror. Kahn takes the structure of the French courtroom to examine it in granular detail. This is just one case, true, but it’s stark enough for Kahn and co-writer Nathalie Hertzberg to breath nuance into court transcripts and newspaper articles. The acting, the very hurling of words across a small room, drives all the paradoxical points home, with Worthalter magnetic as the mercurial Goldman – a hard man to like but also to look away from.

The Goldman case is well-known in France; the accused published his memoirs while in prison on remand, along with many other authors who attempted to convey the very singular problem that was Ariel Goldman. The son of Polish refugees, his mother was a militant Marxist who introduced him to rebels in Cuba, leading to time spent as a fighter in Venezuela. On return to France, he became an armed robber. He admitted to the charges against him, except for the murder of the two pharmacists. He refused to call witnesses in his defence, claiming ‘I am innocent because I am innocent’. Yet behind his firebrand ideology is the indisputable fact that his lofty ideals have been degraded to the point where he makes his living as an armed robber. Kiejman, charged with defending him, has never put a foot wrong in French society.

Kahn, a director (his last film was Happy Birthday in 2019), writer and actor, uses his experience in front and behind the camera to gradually suck the air from the room so only the words and the performances are left. (Production design has not only painted the court in brown panelled walls, but filled it with onlookers dressed in the uniform ‘autumnal’ colours of the mid-1970s). Are/were French trials really like this, with the defendant and prosecutor and judge and both legal teams – even the jury – so voluble, so emotional, so physically close together?  For those international viewers whose previous experience of French courtrooms only amounts to TV series Spiral (Engragages), the close proximity of the principal players will come as an intense surprise.

There is no score, with the words and sounds the only emotional gears, rising to a crescendo. There is scant female presence, for that matter, yet this doesn’t feels bullish, or overly male. Ideas are in the dock, and the dissolution of them. The gallery is in a constant state of barely-controlled frenzy, shouting support for the flawed anti-establishment figure. Technically, The Goldman Case is a film to admire for all it achieves in such a structured format – emotionally, too, despite the fact the case is very particular, there is so much to engage.