This article appeared in the August 30, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

The Goldman Case (Cédric Kahn, 2023)

Predicated on sleight-of-hand suspense, surprise witnesses, and theatrical grandstanding, courtroom movies are a mainstream staple. But rarely do they dramatize trials with known denouements or ambiguous resolutions, which confront the spectator with actual facts. The Goldman Case, directed by Cédric Kahn from a script written by Kahn and Nathalie Hertzberg, is a brilliant example of a courtroom drama that eschews familiar tropes, placing an individual subject into the context of a larger, historical subject in scrupulously open-ended fashion.

Pierre Goldman (1944-79), born at the height of the Holocaust to two Polish-Jewish members of France’s Communist resistance, aspired to be, like his parents, a “Jewish warrior.” Inspired by the Cuban revolution, he sought to make one in Venezuela. When armed struggle was abandoned there in 1969, Goldman returned to Paris. As a New Left righteous outlaw, Goldman planned to mug Jacques Lacan; as a reader of Sartre, he saw himself as an existential Jew. Goldman rejected religion and opposed Zionism. Rather, he identified and associated with fellow stigmatized “foreigners”—mainly émigrés from the French Antilles.

The recent student uprising in France seemed to him mere bourgeois posturing; Goldman imagined he might form a group of urban guerrillas. His cell, however, had only a single member—himself. In Chicago, the violent SDS faction whose participants called themselves “Weathermen” staged their Days of Rage. In Paris, Goldman took to holding up pharmacies. The police, acting on a tip from one of Goldman’s left-wing pals, arrested him in April 1970. He admitted to all of his drugstore robberies except one in which a pharmacist and her assistant were fatally shot, maintaining that he was framed for the double murder.

Jailed in 1970, Goldman was tried in 1974, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment. On the advice of Jean Genet, he wrote a prison memoir–cum–legalistic defense, Dim Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France (1975), which, hailed by Sartre and others, made him a left-wing cause célèbre—a living Josef K., the new Alfred Dreyfus. Dim Memories, which Goldman dedicated to Chris Marker with thanks for the cassettes of Cuban music sent to lift his spirits in prison, led to a second trial. That retrial is the exclusive subject of Kahn’s film.

Save for a brief introduction to establish that on the eve of the trial, Goldman had attempted to fire his Jewish lawyer Georges Kiejman, The Goldman Case takes place entirely inside the courtroom or an adjacent holding cell, and it is as formally rigorous as Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962) in presenting an unyielding, self-possessed, imprisoned defendant. Embodied by Arieh Worthalter, Goldman is an imposing figure, with a proud posture and an implacable glower, oblivious to the young spectators who applaud him—as well as to his celebrity supporters, Simone Signoret and Régis Debray. Worthalter (who has been garlanded with multiple French awards for his portrayal) performs Goldman as perhaps Goldman performed Goldman, too pure to call character witnesses or name the informant who sold him to the police. His defense is an existential tautology: “I am innocent because I am innocent.”

Preferring to defend Goldman on grounds of police bumbling and dubious witnesses, the practical Kiejman (Arthur Harari, who co-wrote the screenplay for Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall) is consistently interrupted by Goldman’s fiery denunciation of French racism and anti-Semitism; at one point the defendant shouts, “Jewish and Black is the same!” Kiejman cautions his client to little avail. Midway through the movie, Goldman’s angry rejoinder to the sarcastic, adversarial lawyer representing his alleged victims (“You stink of racism . . . You’re a fascist and a racist defending a racist police force”) not only disrupts the trial but precipitates an actual brawl among the spectators. Our protagonist is dragged from the courtroom with half the crowd yelling “Fascist police!” and others shouting “Goldman assassin!”

Rich with subtext, The Goldman Case suggests both docu- and psychodrama. Worthalter and Harari are both of Jewish descent. When Worthalter asked Kahn if he thought Goldman was guilty, he was told only that Goldman believed himself innocent. Comparing his method to the filming of a live sporting event, Kahn shot The Goldman Case in sequence; extensive coverage allowed him to pepper the testimony with spontaneous spectator reaction shots. Although they surely knew how the trial turned out, extras had no prior knowledge of the script.

Goldman’s memoir was quoted by both the defense and the prosecution. As befits a trial instigated by a book, language is key to the film. In the absence of material evidence, the case against Goldman was based solely on the testimonies of witnesses, and Goldman frequently draws attention to the words they use. There was no transcript of the trial, however; Kahn and Hertzberg interviewed Kiejman, who died in 2023, and reconstructed the daily court proceedings from newspaper accounts of both of Goldman’s trials. The summations, according to Kahn, were reproduced virtually word for word, as were Goldman’s letters attempting to discharge Kiejman.

Shown in NYC as part of last January’s New York Jewish Film Festival, The Goldman Case is a profoundly Jewish film, unusually explicit in dramatizing the internal divisions that existed and continue to exist among Jews. It concerns not only the question of Goldman’s guilt or the possibility of his receiving a fair trial, but also the tension between Kiejman and Goldman, intelligent men who understood each other too well. Kiejman was also the child of left-wing Polish Jews—his father, deported from France, died at Auschwitz—albeit one who had reached an accommodation with French society. In his obstinate purity, Goldman resented Kiejman’s tendency to discredit police procedure and impugn witnesses without attacking their racist motives. He derides the self-made lawyer as a contemptible “armchair Jew.”

Indeed, the lawyer (who came from an even more impoverished background than Goldman’s) was a successful striver, although not adverse to controversial causes, having defended Marxist philosopher Guy Debord and, decades later, the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. He also had extensive show-business connections, representing both directors (Truffaut, Godard, Costa-Gavras) and actors (Simone Signoret, Jeanne Moreau, Yves Montand), as well as Cahiers du cinéma itself. In the 1990s, he served a term as president of Film France, and in 2009, he defended another Polish Jew (and Holocaust child), Roman Polanski—whose 2019 film about the Dreyfus affair, An Officer and a Spy, has still not been shown in the U.S.

Goldman’s career flourished after the trial as well. Released from prison in 1976, he served on the editorial board of Sartre’s journal Les Temps modernes, wrote for the left-wing daily Libération, and published a picaresque novel, L’Ordinaire mésaventure d’Archibald Rapoport (The Ordinary Misadventures of Archibald Rapoport), in 1977. Never translated into English, it seems to be a looking-glass version of his memoir in which a child of Holocaust survivors turns to murder in order to further his writerly ambitions, then facilitates his execution so that he might be read. Forty-five years ago next month, Goldman was gunned down in central Paris, on the Place de l’Abbé-Georges-Hénocque, allegedly by an obscure right-wing group called Honneur de la Police. Thousands attended his burial at Père Lachaise cemetery.

In some ways, Goldman’s retrial was an episode in France’s culture wars. In his on-screen summation, the prosecution lawyer claims to speak for the “true” France, in opposition to the intellectual elite who have fallen for Goldman’s canny appeal to radical chic. By contrast, Kiejman praises Goldman’s patriotic family, and makes a plea for all Jews, Gypsies, and ritals (a derogatory term for Italians) as part of the French nation. But then his summation abruptly veers into the fascination that the trial exerts. Goldman is not the Dostoyevsky character he is imagined to be. Rather than something out of Crime and Punishment or Demons, Goldman’s personality is “the fruit of a real tragedy,” namely the genocide of European Jews. Speaking for the first time as a product of the same culture that formed Goldman, Kiejman concludes with an unexpectedly Freudian twist: “We never recover from our childhoods.”

The evocation of Jewish trauma (and stigmatization) is unmistakable. In Dim Memories, Goldman had maintained that his first trial precipitated intense solidarity among religious, nonreligious, communist, conservative, Zionist, anti-Zionist, and non-Zionist Jews. “All of them, during the trial, had felt that they were Jewish . . . I was a criminal, a thief, but falsely accused of murder, unjustly condemned. I had, for a moment, represented the Jews before the Justice of the goyim.” In his brief statement at the end of the film, however, Goldman remains true to form in rejecting any special pleading, albeit with a twist: “I don’t want anyone to say I acted like a Jew who implied a non-Jew has no right to think a Jew can kill, and those who do are anti-Semitic.” Goldman’s partisans erupt in joy when, although convicted on every other count, he is exonerated for the murders, leaving the spectator to puzzle out the implication of his final words.

J. Hoberman is a New York–based film and culture critic, currently teaching at Columbia University, and a contributing editor to Film Comment.