Cedric Kahn’s fact-based legal drama “The Goldman Case” is both a procedural and fascinating portrait of a complex, sometimes unpleasant figure: the defendant Pierre Goldman. It is a film that almost never leaves the courtroom and the adjoining lawyers’ chambers, as Goldman (a riveting Arieh Worthalter), a charismatic and depressed radical and writer-turned-criminal, plays to his left wing, multiracial claque in the courtroom.
Goldman is on trial appealing a life-imprisonment conviction for two murders he insists he did not do—while almost proudly admitting to multiple armed robbery charges. He hectors witnesses and tends to generally bluster and grandstand. (The trial was a cause célèbre in France, and Goldman was championed by Sartre and Simone Signoret.) He won’t allow his lawyers to call witnesses, rejecting the notion that testaments to his character and conduct have anything to do with his defense and professing himself “disgusted” by courtroom pomp and theatricality. Goldman engages in fierce rhetorical attacks against the police that his lawyers, wary of a broadly conceived conspiracy defense that the police are all racists, try to stop him from using.
He declares baldly, “I’m innocent because I’m innocent.” But Goldman is more contradictory in his behavior than that.
Goldman’s main lawyer, Georges Kiejman (Arthur Harari), is not interested in a political defense, nor is he interested in using his Jewish identity to explain his behavior—though the film raises the whole question of Judaism. What he does is painstakingly and pointedly question the witnesses, some of the police clearly prejudiced, to undermine their testimony of what they saw. He comes into conflict with the abrasive Goldman, but it is Kiejman’s defense that saves Goldman. He is sentenced to six years in prison and receives an early release—though it is mentioned without explanation that he was assassinated three years later.
The film merely sketches Goldman’s turbulent bio, but we learn that his parents were Polish Jewish communists (his mother and melancholy father who separated were also fighters in the Resistance) and that he repudiated May 1968 to join a guerrilla force in Venezuela and returned to France to become a radical gangster. The film is more austere than the flamboyant bio, staying with the interactions in the courtroom and leaving the world outside unseen. Though Goldman’s volatile—and somewhat dangerous—personality provides the film with dramatic fireworks denouncing a France he sees as racist and antisemitic, Kahn’s film maintains a coolly neutral perspective about his innocence, though it is critical of the police and French society. And if it doesn’t endorse Goldman’s overstatements, it clearly powerfully conveys how prejudiced French society was and probably still is.
