• Reviews

• All
• Music
• DVDs
• Live
• Cinema
• TV
• Books
• Comic Books
• Video Games

Sep 09, 2024 By Jeremy Arblaster Web Exclusive

“There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. ... That sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. ... Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. ... So now, less than five years later ... and with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

When Hunter S. Thompson wrote these words in 1971’s Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, he was looking back at a tumultuous decade where real change had seemed possible, only for it to all fall away. The revolution was over and the old forces remained. But when French prisoner and radical Pierre Goldman released his own book in 1975, Obscure Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France, in which he continued to refute his conviction of the brutal armed robbery and murder of two pharmacists in Paris—a swell of support led to a retrial in 1976, and a chance to take on France’s institutions.

Forming the basis of The Goldman Case, director Cedric Kahn televises the revolution in this intense and fascinating dramatization of Goldman’s infamous trial – one that feels less like the judgment of an individual and more an examination of 20^th-century history, dominated as it is by the painful reverberations of the Second World War and the Holocaust. And though Goldman’s ferocious interjections seem to direct the spotlight entirely upon him, the moments of reflective examination, found in the oft-quoted passages of his book or in conversation with his sympathetic supporters, point toward a man in the shadow of his heroic Polish parents, members of the French resistance during the war. Indeed Goldman appears as a rather tragic figure, wrapped up in the causes of the Cubans and Venezuelans, but returning to France at the end of the 1960s to a life of crime without a cause. Washed up as the wave rolled back.

But the self-styled guerilla makes full use of his new platform to attack, setting his sights on France’s police force, which he sees as corrupt and institutionally racist, and the country’s legal system, with his frequent outbursts, lending the film’s courtroom scenes a frenetic energy amid grandstanding from both sides. And though the details of the case are explored in their minutiae, the bubbling tension between Goldman and almost everyone else in the room proves captivating. Goldman’s frustration provides a notable counter to that of his patient lawyer Georges Kiejman (Anatomy of a Fall co-writer Arthur Harrari), the upstanding citizen to Goldman’s chaotic criminal. They are two children of the Holocaust with diverging destinies, reckoning with their own Jewishness in the wake of one of history’s darkest chapters.

As Goldman, Arieh Worthalter balances shame, anger, and intellect in a performance of simmering verve. Obscure Memories is a piece of confessional writing that, whilst examining his own family’s history of persecution, aligns Goldman as a victim of larger antisemitic machinations and thus creates a galvanizing piece of literature. One that ultimately led to his re-trial. But it is no communist pamphlet, it’s a book that succeeds in the capitalist market, championed by France’s leftist elites. Worthalter does well to capture Goldman’s complexities and contradictions. Nevertheless, and despite the best efforts of the President (Stéphan Guérin-Tillié), the courtroom is a chamber at the whim of Goldman’s rousing words, eliciting reactionary statements from both counsel and gallery alike. The courtroom’s extras were not privy to the script and with only loose instruction, their reactions have the authenticity of a live recording. Kahn’s choice to shoot the film in The Academy Ratio only adds to the intensity, framing the trial as if it were a public square where ideologies clash.

Yet ultimately the condensed spectacle of The Goldman Case acts as its own restraints. Largely limited to the courtroom and without any real evidence, Goldman’s trial is one of questions and words. And though Kahn lets them rip through the film’s 110 minutes, the absence of facts and context can be keenly felt. It’s a trial worthy of explosive tabloid headlines, but reckoning with France’s “inability to render justice to its Jewish citizens” seems frustratingly out of reach.

*Excerpts taken from Thomas Holden’s “Pierre Goldman and the Beginnings of Jeune Littérature Juive.” French Forum 28, no. 2 (2003): 57–76.

Author rating: 7/10