The Goldman Case

Cedric Kahn keeps almost the entire film inside one room, a Paris courtroom in 1976. Pierre Goldman is being retried for four robberies, one of which left two people dead. He admits the others and denies that one, and he insists on defending his politics at the same time as his innocence, which is precisely what makes him impossible to defend. There is no elaborate lighting, no score, no flashback, no reconstruction of the night in question. You get testimony, contradiction and the temperature of the room. Arieh Worthalter plays Goldman and Arthur Harari plays his lawyer Kiejman, and their friction drives the film, because the client does not trust his own counsel either. The demand it makes is real: 115 minutes of one room and dense talk. Without some feel for the French left of the 1970s, a few references pass you by. It opened the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 2023. Who it is for: courtroom drama without ornament. Who it is not for: viewers who need pace and incident.