Justice Is Done

A woman stands accused of killing her terminally ill lover at his own request, and the jury retires to decide. André Cayatte’s film looks not at the accused but at the jurors: each one’s life, marriage, loss and belief make them read the same file differently, and every one of them takes a different story out of the same trial. Cayatte practised law before he made films, and this is the first of a series of pictures he made questioning how justice actually works in postwar France. It reaches no verdict for or against euthanasia; it asks instead who is deciding. It won the Golden Lion at the 1950 Venice Film Festival and the Golden Bear at the first Berlin Film Festival in 1951. The record names the accused as Elsa Lundenstein, while one source gives a different character name and a different actress; the two could not be reconciled.