The Goldman Case
The Goldman Case
The promo materials for the legal drama ‘The Goldman Case’ point it out to you that the filmmakers are aware that even the title of the movie might strike you to another famous case. In the email I received announcing this movie’s stateside rollout: ‘Twenty years before the O.J. Simpson case, the Goldman trial is representative of the political, ideological as well as racial conflicts that shaped France and Europe in the 1970s.’
While the email also said this was ‘considered to be the trial of the century,’ the emotion of the documentary is less interested in the fallout of this trial that shocked the nation and the focus in the aftermath of this event on the actions in the court itself.
The Goldman Case depicts the trial of Pierre Goldman (Arieh Worthalter) accused of armed robbery and murder in mid-1970s France, who was a left wing radical activist arrested in the late sixties. He participated in several bombings, including a Colorado 1967 caper where his associates held two women hostage, which he lightly recalls. While he accepts a few robberies, one in particular, a pharmacy assault in 1969 that resulted in two women’s deaths, is the one that he claims he never committed.
Undeniably, Goldman is a very passionate and often fiery defendant. He tends to incite the audience, which consists mostly of the youth and people of color, by accusing racist cops of devising this entire thing as a conspiracy out of nothing. He thinks that quite a group is dainty about him being a Polish Jew locked behind bars. As such, when they arrested him, some of the bystanders reported that he appeared ‘maybe something like Arab, kind of mulatto.’ He runs into trouble since his lawyers, telling him not to utter a word, gets into more trouble every time. At this tome [sic] he was in custody, he published (or rather authored) a very nice incendiary book about himself with an odd title (‘Obscure Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France’) that the prosecution has consistently quoted as evidence.
Because most of the drama is located in a courtroom (bar for brief excursions in which Goldman is abandoned in a holding cell while talking strategies with his lawyers), The Goldman Case will most probably be perceived by the viewers as a drama filmed in a theatre. There is, however, no similar Aiken Sorkin to cast away a tale from its root meaning having Leah Franklin, just coineer and director Cadre Cleaner Kahn — he hesitates in grandiosities and in omnipresent music tapes. It’s mostly herkshersh activity; documentary portable movements of lawyers from the feu, classroom cuckoo Harris stretching beans, watching lawyers deconstruct believers’ very subjective accounts, or people who claimed to have sat on Goldman sticks that gory night, about what happened and what did not.
“The Goldman Case” is a movie where many characters at some point in time and in the frame try to not make any more spectra inferring that they do the pinching, some aren’t very good at this. The leader in this company strikes Goldman, whose ferocity carries ou Worthalter (so recently won this César for Best Actor already for his role). From Kahn’s and Worthalter’s view Goldman was spoilt and self-destructive; high on Anti-establishment ethos style but then decided to be rebellious on his lawyers too. He often gets into conflicts with his principal lawyer (Arthur Harari), who is in many ways a Jew like Goldman but whom Goldman treats as an ‘armchair Jew’.
Like the recent releases in the US of modern French courtroom dramas such as The Goldman case, the focus of the film however is less on who committed the crime, and how it was planned and executed, than how a verdict of guilty or innocent is rendered.
This film suggests that in the context of a French court, it is possible for the courtroom to function as a pressurized chamber, particularly in a situation where a sensitive trial is underway. That is everyone, rather the jurors and the audience, gets the chance to voice their emotions whenever it is appropriate, which is nearly always. Kahn probably intended perhaps this film to be some sort of a critique on how unexciting our court cases (and courtroom dramas) really are in comparison to what goes on over there.
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- Genre: Crime, Drama
- Country: United States
- Director: Cédric Kahn
- Cast: Arieh Worthalter, Arthur Harari, Stéphan Guérin-Tilli, Nicolas Briançon, Aurélien Chaussade
