Opening the Quinzaine des Cinéastes, Cédric Kahn'sLe Procès Goldman revisits the controversial media case of Pierre Goldman, the far-left activist accused of murdering two pharmacists on Paris's Boulevard Richard Lenoir in 1969.
The Goldman Trial will be available on Netflix from July 27, 2025.
Synopsis: April 1976 saw the start of the second trial of Pierre Goldman, a far-left activist who had been sentenced in the first instance to life imprisonment for four armed robberies, one of which resulted in the death of two pharmacists. Claiming his innocence in the latter case, he became an icon of the intellectual left in the space of a few weeks. Georges Kiejman, a young lawyer, took up his defense. But their relationship soon became strained. Goldman, elusive and provocative, risks the death penalty and makes the outcome of the trial uncertain.
Seven years and a first trial that sentenced him to life imprisonment later, Cédric Kahn opens the courtroom of Pierre Goldman's second trial, referred to the Amiens assizes on procedural grounds. In the ranks were Simone Signoret and Régis Debray, who had come to lend their influential support to the man they believed to be wrongly accused, and who, backed by a large part of the left-wing intelligentsia, was indeed proclaiming his innocence.
Far from the murderous white convertible jaunts of Roberto Succo (2001), Cédric Kahn's Le Procès Goldman is a true trial film like no other. At a time when the true-crime fad has never been so prevalent on TV schedules and streaming platforms, the French filmmaker is interested only in the judicial side of the case, in a courtroom that resembles a theater stage.
Defended by Maître Kiejman (Arthur Harari), then still unfamiliar with assize trials, Arieh Worthalter plays a principled, upright Pierre Goldman with ardor and panache. Holding the trial - and, by trickle, the film - together from start to finish with his response and his defiance of everyone, right down to his own lawyer, this anti-hero is served by carefully crafted dialogue (some of it delivered by the real Goldman during his successive trials), indispensable to a good trial film.
It's from these codes, taken to the extreme, that the film draws all its power. Its dense, breathless temporality brings the trial to life from the inside, as witnesses testify in court, almost in real time. Speech saturates space and time, leaving no room for silence until the verdict, which is also covered in the words of the audience.
From details to outbursts, from mocking bon mots to the confrontation of two opposing worlds on the audience benches - the old and the new, the right and the left, youth with ideals and the forces of law and order accused, even then, of violence - this impeccable closed-door film doesn't allow itself any glimpses of the outside world, even if only in the salle des pas perdus, or any visualization of the words of either side. We'll have to take the eyewitnesses' word for it - or not, as we know that the devil (and here, acquittal or conviction) hides in the details.
Tackling head-on themes that have never been so topical (the unrelenting trio of racism, anti-Semitism and fascism), right up to the showdown that breaks up the ranks and the film's rhythm, The Goldman Trial is, ultimately and politically, terribly contemporary.
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