This Explosive Courtroom Drama Recounts the Murder Trial of Pierre Goldman

The double-murder trial of Pierre Goldman – gangster, revolutionary and darling of the Parisian literary scene – caused a sensation in France through the summer of 1976. His scene-stealing turn in the dock forms the basis of The Goldman Case, Cedric Kahn’s explosive new courtroom drama, but oddly enough, the question of Goldman’s innocence was never a motivating factor in its making.

“What interested me was not Goldman’s story but his personality, his way of speaking and his spirit,” says Kahn of his subject, a compulsive showman who used his trial to make sweeping indictments of the police for their systemic racism. “I didn’t want to do a film where the audience becomes empathetic to Goldman, and by observing him only through the trial you get this kind of push-pull effect, towards someone who is quite repulsive and attractive at the same time.” 

The trial was a circus that opened up still-festering wounds in postwar French society. Goldman, played with simmering rage by Arieh Worthalter in the film, was born in Lyon in 1944 to Jewish parents active in the French resistance. Joining the communist party in 1963, he hitched his wagon to revolutionary causes in Cuba and Venezuela before returning to Paris after the ’68 student riots, where he drifted into a life of crime.

When two pharmacists died from gunshot wounds during an armed robbery in 1974, Goldman was found guilty of their murder and received a death sentence, later reduced to life in prison. Maintaining his innocence, he wrote a book in jail that rallied the likes of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre to his cause, and enlisted the services of a young Jewish lawyer, Georges Kiejman, to help overturn his conviction. “The trial took place eight years after the ’68 [riots], when people [in France] were starting to renounce these big ideas of the left, but Goldman was hanging on to it,” says Kahn. “He still wanted to embody this idea of revolution, and he was defended to the hilt [by the literati] out of a nostalgia for that revolutionary spirit.”

To this day, debates still rage on the question of Goldman’s culpability. (We won’t spoil the outcome of the trial.) Kahn says his own feelings about the man are “difficult to express”. Goldman’s widow hated the film, he says, while Kiejman never got to see it: he died ten days before the film’s premiere at Cannes last year. “I would like to share one story, though,” says Kahn. “I spoke with someone close to Goldman who said he only respected people who thought he was guilty.” Make of that what you will.

Whatever the truth, it’s the fraught relationship between the two men – Goldman, the hothead agitator who repeatedly sabotages his own case, and Kiejman, the cool intellect tasked with keeping him in line – that drives the film. But for Kahn, himself a child of left-wing Jewish parents, it’s what they share in common that divides them. “They’re like two sides of the same coin,” he says of the pair, born to Polish migrant families and forced to navigate their Jewish identity in a society that helped send their people to the Nazi death camps just a few years prior. As we see in the film, it’s a trauma that plays out across their lives in very different ways.

Kiejman, played with clenched authority by Arthur Harari, works within the confines of a system blind to its own prejudice; he even cops at one point to downplaying his Jewishness so as not to affect the case. Goldman speaks of his desire to become a “Jewish warrior, to rid myself of the stigma of being a Jew” – and this is where Kahn’s film takes on a strikingly contemporary resonance, because The Goldman Case builds to an astonishing closing speech that is all the more remarkable for being true. (Incoming mild spoiler alert.)

“To put it simply,” says Goldman, his strident tone suddenly vanishing, “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 that those who do are antisemitic.” From there it’s hardly a flying leap of logic to draw parallels with today’s situation in Gaza and Beirut – and in fact, Kahn and co-writer Nathalie Hertzberg took a certain amount of artistic liberty to get it into the film.

“Those lines he speaks were actually spoken two years later, in an interview,” says the director. “And it’s funny, because Goldman does the opposite [in the case]: he says he’s being accused because he is Jewish. But we added them in, because I really felt like I couldn’t make this film without putting that sentence in there.” Haunting and prophetic, it’s a line that lays bare the historical traumas at the heart of this film. 

The Goldman Case is out in UK cinemas now.