Born in 1944, the son of Polish Jewish refugees who were both resistance fighters and communists, Pierre Goldman was a French far-left militant, intellectual and writer who came to prominence through his political activism, his involvement in bank robberies and his unsolved murder – his assassination, in Paris in 1979, has been variously attributed to the anti-Eta death squad Gal, the French intelligence service and the monarchist group Action Française.
Goldman’s life was shaped by revolutionary fervour stemming from his Jewish-Polish background, opposition to fascism and support for anti-colonial movements. In the heady months following the student protests of May 1968, Goldman committed a spree of robberies. He was arrested in 1969 and charged with the murder of two pharmacists.
He confessed to three robberies but maintained his innocence of the killings. In prison, Goldman wrote his celebrated autobiography, Souvenirs Obscurs d’un Juif Polonais né en France (Obscure Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France).
The book, which outlined his life, political philosophy and guerrilla activities in Venezuela, became a bestseller. By the time he came to trial in 1975, he was a celebrity, attracting huge crowds in the gallery, and championed by Simone Signoret and Jean-Paul Sartre.
That trial is sensationally re-created by the acclaimed director Cédric Kahn in The Goldman Case, a thrilling new courtroom drama. The film has been hugely impactful in France.
“The Goldman Case is ... the awakening of a man torn between his identity, history and his faith in a very French universalist idea of justice,” Clément Ghys, the culture editor of Le Monde, writes. “The action is situated in the 1970s, but the movie echoes the debates and scars of France today. It couldn’t be more contemporary.”
Kahn remembers seeing Goldman’s memoir in his parents’ library as a child. Reading the text decades later was a revelation. “I knew he was a militant and a left-winger,” he says. “I knew he was an icon for the generation older than me. I knew he had a very, very famous brother” – Jean-Jacques Goldman – “who is a singer. I knew he had problems with justice. And that was all I knew before I read the book.”
Courtroom dramas are having a moment in France. Anatomy of a Fall, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the best-screenplay Oscar for Justine Triet and Arthur Harari, premiered alongside The Goldman Case at the French film festival in 2023. Alice Diop’s absorbing Saint Omer, a fictionalised retelling of the 2016 trial of a Senegalese student accused of infanticide on the northern French coast, won the Silver Lion Grand Jury prize and the Luigi De Laurentis Lion of the Future award at Venice International Film Festival in 2022.
In common with these films, The Goldman Case clinically dissects France’s judicial system and uses the courtroom to put the nation on trial.
Khan is a fan of the genre, even if The Goldman Trial feels distinct from such genre standards as Hitchcock’s Witness for the Prosecution.
“I’ve always wanted to make a courtroom drama,” says the Red Lights director. “I love Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Truth and JFK. But I didn’t think about or watch these films for The Goldman Case. I watched documentaries. I was interested in creating the truth. As soon as you’ve got a strong constraint like setting a drama inside a courtroom, your imagination works harder.
Kahn’s stirring procedural unfolds almost exclusively in a criminal courtroom in Amiens, in northern France, where Goldman is retried after a botched and inconsistent first prosecution. There are no flashbacks or cutaways. There is no score. The drama is the trial itself. Some exchanges are taken from contemporaneous reports of the two Goldman trials, held in 1974 and 1975.
Khan and his co-writer had to fill in some blanks. French law forbids filming or photographing trials, and complete transcripts were not made available to the film-makers. Certain speeches are partially lifted from Goldman’s memoir or interviews with Goldman’s friends, lawyers and associates.
“Reading the book which he wrote between his two trials while he was in prison was a discovery,” says Kahn, who wrote the script with Nathalie Hertzberg. “To discover just how brilliant and powerful his mind was. And also how manipulative and ambiguous he was. We were more like detectives than scriptwriters.
“People, especially the left of the time, idolised this man, despite his ambiguities. That is fascinating about Goldman. He was a mystery. He remains a mystery. There were parts of the story that were very clear and very well written. And other parts were just kind of empty holes. I didn’t have a message that he wanted to say in the film. I wanted all contradictions.”
In the opening scenes of The Goldman Case, the accused (a magnetic Arieh Worthalter) fires his representation in a lengthy and impassioned letter. It’s complicated. Goldman’s lawyer, Georges Kiejman (played by Harari, who is also an actor), is a Holocaust survivor whom Goldman accuses of being an “armchair Jew”. They reconcile for a case that touches on wider issues of systemic anti-Semitism in French society. Kiejman was one of several interviewees consulted during the screenwriting process.
“His lawyers we spoke with still had a great affection for him,” Kahn says. “It was an ambivalent affection. They remain incredibly fascinated by him, but they also said, ‘Maybe you shouldn’t make a film about him, because he did betray people’. And you can never quite fix them on the question of whether he was guilty or not. When I was talking to them I realised how much shadow is there. And grey areas make for great cinema. Working in an investigative space, they filled in the gaps of the things that we couldn’t find.”
In 2001 Khan scored an early international hit with Roberto Succo, a portrait of the prolific serial killer known as the Monster of Mestre, which premiered as part of the official selection of the Cannes Festival. He returned to true-life crime in 2014 with Wild Life, a survivalist drama about a divorced man who abducted his children and eluded the authorities for more than a decade.
“With The Goldman Case I’ve made three films based on true stories,” Kahn says. “What interests me is the mystery in the true story. When I made Roberto Succo I was obsessed with the facts, with re-creating the story as closely as possible to reality. What I’ve learned is that you can invent things without necessarily betraying that reality. That’s an interesting thing, because that opens a much wider space to play with.”
The Goldman Case is one of two much-admired Kahn-directed movies that will be released here this year. Last year his metafictional drama Making Of premiered at Venice International Film Festival, four months after The Goldman Case took a bow at Cannes. Making Of follows the crew of a film depicting an uprising of factory workers, and it’s a remarkably kinetic approximation of the hustle of film-making and, ultimately, a demonstration of how easy it is for a movie to implode.
“Making Of took so long to get off the ground,” Kahn says. “It should have been made much sooner. And then, suddenly, it was ready. The money was there. The actors were there. So I had to shoot the two films back to back. I was shooting and editing and doing the promotion for both. I was extremely tired.
“They are both very intense films. And they are both political. The Making Of denounces the hierarchies in film-making. The Goldman Case is about societal hierarchies. They are very different films, but they are both about things that are very close to me. So I experienced all the work as an incredibly exciting creative moment.”
The Goldman Case opens in cinemas on Friday, September 20th
