The Goldman Case review - blistering French political drama

It’s a bold move to give a UK cinema release to this fierce courtroom drama about a French left-wing intellectual who was assassinated in1979. Pierre Goldman isn’t exactly a well-known figure on this side of the Channel, but perhaps the distributors hope that after the recent box-office success of Anatomy of A Fall and Saint Omer, there’s a whetted appetite for another forensic examination of the French legal system.

Certainly anyone who goes to see The Goldman Case will find much to admire in this claustrophobic but utterly absorbing film. Director Cédric Kahn has restaged the 1976 trial of Pierre Goldman for robbery and murder – a hugely contentious case that captivated the French media and became known as the Trial of the Century. 

Arieh Worthalter plays Goldman, the son of Polish Jewish parents who were themselves part of the Resistance in France. He gives a breathtakingly intense performance as Goldman, who mounts a blistering attack on the French legal system – and the very nature of truth and justice itself. Worthalter is supported by an excellent cast playing Goldman's admirers, his one-time lover Christiane (Chloé Lecerf pictured below), his prosecutors and his own, often exasperated legal team.

Kahn confines the action to the wood-lined courtroom and evokes the 1970s through subtle use of period costume and hairstyles without fetishing the period. The look of the film is all tobacco browns and teal blues, evoking the era through almost subliminally effective colour grading. The judicious camerawork and merciful absence of music adds to the film’s documentary feel, but it’s very much a drama, one based on Goldman's memoir, which he wrote in prison, and interviews with the original legal team, contemporary media coverage, and court transcripts.

Goldman himself was vehemently opposed to the theatricality, pomp, and artifice of the court, and refused to allow witnesses to testify to his good character. A charismatic firebrand, he counted Simone Signoret and Jean-Paul Sartre among his admirers. The trial divided France much as the Dreyfus affair had done between 1894 and 1906.

Goldman makes no bones about his complex past – his periods in psychiatric hospitals, his use of prostitutes, and his ambivalence about being seen as a Jewish warrior who freely admits to raising funds for guerilla activists via robbery. His fervid insistence that, despite all those transgressions, he was not present when two pharmacists were killed in a raid on a drugstore is at the centre of the case, but it’s really his politics and character that are being put on trial.

Even if an audience doesn’t relish the opportunity given by The Goldman Case to see the French legal system up close and observe how it differs from our own, the chance to see such a gripping performance by Worthalter is well worth the price of admission.

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