The Goldman Case
The press materials for the Julie Taymor courtroom drama “The Goldman Case” suggest that the filmmakers understand that even the film’s title will evoke the Pasha case. In the email I received on this film’s release in the USA, it was stated: “Twenty years before the O. J. Simpson case, the Goldman trial speaks of the political, ideological, and racial tensions that were conspicuous in France and Europe in the 1970s.”
While we did receive an email saying this was one such trial called “considered to be the trial of the century,” the US is less concerned on how the nation was rocked by this trial and more so what happened in the court.
‘The Goldman case’ centers on the mid 1970s trial of Pierre Goldman (Arieh Worthalter), a French left-wing militant revolutionary for armed robbery and murders that occurred in the late 60s period. While Goldman confesses committing the robberies and even though he gets the two illegal pharmacy attacks which claimed the lives of women as the legal robberies that he alleges he never committed.
Goldman is an angry defendant, to say the least. He regularly incites the audience, which is young and mostly of a brown complexion, by claiming that this event is simply a scheme cooked up by the racist police department. In his words, they wish to imprison him because he is a Polish Jew and as people’s witnesses say, he was dressed like an Arab and a “kind of mulatto” at his arrest. With the counsel’s best advice being to stop making a fuss, he has problems of his own and cannot refrain from doing so. While still in prison, he published a controversial autobiography (“Obscure Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France”) that is widely cited by the prosecutors.
Given that most of the actions occur in a courtroom with occasional cutaways to Goldman in a holding cell plotting with his lawyers, many people will probably think of “The Goldman Case” as watching a movie version of the play one is used to a courtroom drama or some sort of a play. However, there is a big difference between Aaron Sorkin and co-writer and director Cedric Kahn, in the sense that Kahn’s perspective in this particular film is more of a grim and straightforward account of what happened, without narration or music. It is simply a continuous movement of one set of lawyers who are also witnesses on the podium, and an angry observer and supposed victim, Goldman, who is defending the reliability of witnesses and arguments.
As many characters often appear to be calm in “The Goldman Case,” some of them are spectacular failures when trying to do so. The film’s antagonist, Goldman, is convincingly played by Worthalter who has been granted the best male honor in this year’s Cesar Awards for his representation. Both through Kahn’s lens and through his performance in this film instrumental Kahn, Goldman is depicted as childish, self-destructive and confused, he relished his ‘anti-establishment’ aesthetic and consequently fought with his own lawyers. Naturally, Goldman bumps heads with his main attorney, Arthur Harari but then again it’s hard to mix with someone who branded himself ‘an armchair Jew’ anyways.
The same can be said for ‘The Goldman Case’ as the rest of the French courtroom movies when they began to make it big in the US market, its intention is not to explore the evidence due to its eventual outcome but rather observe what happens in court after the verdict is announced, whether it is guilty or innocent.
The film depicts how people are frequently quite heated inside a French courtroom as well as its aggressiveness when an important trial is taking place. Almost everyone present in that chamber even the jurors and the audience members could become quite heated at times. One would get the impression that this film was made by Kahn to demonstrate how dull the present day litigation or litigation broadcasted on television is when compared to what happens across the sea.
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