Many who, like this writer, have achieved expertise in the law – some US, some English, some Irish – from watching the telly find French courtroom dramas such as Anatomy of a Fall or Saint Omer enormously stressful. Leading the witness! Counsel is testifying! Will members of the jury please restrain themselves! You wouldn’t get this structured disorder in The Good Wife or Rumpole of the Bailey.
Facetiousness aside, the French system, insofar as I understand it, does facilitate wider, less formal conversations in courtroom drama. One could hardly imagine a better example than this hugely tense riff on the trial of an unruly French intellectual. In 1976, Pierre Goldman (Arieh Worthalter), a busy left-wing campaigner and friend to guerrilla movements, was tried for a series of robberies, one of which involved the murder of four people. Goldman admitted to most of the crimes, but he vehemently denied the murder. The defendant argued he was the victim of a right-wing, anti-Semitic plot.
Cédric Kahn’s film does not ask us to find Goldman lovable. The first scene has his apparently patient lawyers puzzled by a letter from their client telling them they are fired. He feels that one is a mere “armchair Jew”. They eventually talk him down, but Goldman proves irascible and awkward throughout the process. He insults witnesses. He refuses to identify a source offering evidence against him anonymously, even if that might help his case. His father, a hugely admired hero of the Resistance, turns up to offer qualified support, but he can’t conceal disappointment at how Pierre turned out.
There is, of course, an implicit argument that the law does not, or should not, concern itself with any defendant’s manners. But that is just an aside in a drama that touches on a huge array of French discontents from the past couple of centuries: lingering anti-Semitism, the aftermath of occupation, the significance of the 1968 disturbances. On those last events, Goldman, a perceptive critic, talks of supposed revolutionaries returning home at night to “Mum and Dad”.
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The screenplay, drawing from interviews, news reports and legal records, barely moves outside the court, but that focus lends its own claustrophobic tension to the piece. One learns much about recent French history. One learns as much about how it felt to be French when the war was still in the rear-view mirror. A film that is no less thrilling for its sober rigour.
The Goldman Case is in cinemas from Friday, September 20th
