A French armed robber’s trial is the most Jewish film of the year
Antisemitism is on trial in France in The Goldman Case which opens this week
The Goldman Case has a solid case to be the most Jewish film of the year – yet there is not a kippah, challah or klezmer tune in sight.
The movie about the prosecution of French armed robber and darling of the intellectual left, Pierre Goldman, dissects Jewishness in virtually every scene, ruminating on subjects ranging from early Zionism to the socialist Bund. It is as much a Talmudic exegesis of what it is to be a Jew in the decades after the Shoah as an examination of the French justice system and of a sensational legal drama dubbed “the trial of the century”.
In a Paris courtroom in 1976, Goldman is being retried for four armed robberies, one of which left two women dead. He readily admits theft, but denies murder – seeing the charge as “a curse linked to his people’s fate”. As the death penalty would not be abolished in France foranother six years, he faces the guillotine.
Goldman, by turn charismatic, cocksure and vulnerable, makes fiery declarations from the witness box – which threaten to capsize his
own lawyer’s defence, but are met with incessant whoops by his radical supporters in the public gallery. He had acquired the adulation of everyone from philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre to actress Simone Signoret, thanks to his memoir, Dim Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France, published from prison.
The documentary-style film is a two- decade labour of love for Cédric Kahn, French-Jewish director and co-writer (with Nathalie Hertzberg). Kahn was hooked as soon as he read the book “because I thought the character was incredible”, the 58-year-old tells me, via an interpreter, on a video call from his home in Paris. “I thought he was so complex, his violence, his intellectualism, his politics – but it took me 20 years to mull over what form the film would take.”
In it, he explores the dichotomy between Goldman and his defence attorney, Georges Kiejman. Both the “exceptionally tormented” character of Goldman and the tension between the “Israélite” pair are set out in the opening scene, the only one not set in the court, when a letter written by Goldman from his cell is read out. He wants to sack Kiejman because he “can’t stand the guy’s irony, frivolity and armchair Jew’s pettiness”.
Jewish French-born Belgian actor Arieh Worthalter plays the protagonist, while– the Jewish Frenchman who won an Oscar in March for Anatomy of a Fall, the screenplay he wrote with his partner, Justine Triet – plays his lawyer.
Goldman was born in France in 1944 to far-left parents. His father had fled the pogroms of his shtetl to become a hero of the Resistance. Post-liberation, his mother returned to Poland, but her husband “literally kidnapped” their young son to block him from joining her in a country that had witnessed the massacre of millions of his people. Goldman would go on to join a guerrilla group in Venezuela. In 1979, he would be assassinated at point-blank range, aged 35 – by killers still unknown. Fifteen thousand people would attend his funeral.
In court, the accused is racked with guilt “for not hunting down Nazis” and
for not emulating his father’s heroism, instead becoming a drunken thug. “I wanted to be a Jewish warrior too,” he says to the jury, “to free myself of the stigma of being a Jew”. Kahn says Goldman and Kiejman.
his “frère juif ”, embody “the two facets” of what it was to be Jewish during this period. While the lawyer boasted a post-Holocaust resilience, Goldman was “essentially made psychologically fragile by it”, says Kahn. “He is convinced his destiny can only be tragic.”
The director says he shares with Kiejman– whom he interviewed during his research– an ambiguity in his response to Goldman: “A kind of fascination that was also a repulsion. And so the film is this idea of a lawyer with an uncontrollable client.”
When I ask about parallels with Captain Alfred Dreyfus – the victim of the notorious turn-of-the-20th-century antisemitic miscarriage of justice –Kahn laughs before the question is even translated. “It was like a shadow that was over the whole trial because, definitely, society didn’t want another Dreyfus Affair.”
But what is fascinating is that Goldman – the half-brother of pop star Jean- Jacques Goldman – set out to put his Jewishness at the heart of his defence. “Goldman is saying, ‘I am a child of the Shoah and I’m Jewish and I’m being accused because of that, not because I’ve killed two women’. That was his strategy – and it worked.” Kahn pauses. “He would definitely take a different strategy today. Because the time between the Shoah and today is much bigger. And because of everything that is happening today in Israel, they are less seen as victims.” The film came out in France two weeks before 7 October, but is bound to be seen in an altered light when it is released in the UK. (Kahn, Worthalter and Harari have all publicly called for an immediate ceasefire and the release of the hostages.)
An unpublished letter from 1974 came to light last year in which Goldman meditated on “the Jewish Question”. “I wonder if I shouldn’t have gone to Israel in 1966 and lived there among Jews in a Jewish country,” he said. “In any case, I’ll go there. I also think a new period of antisemitism is coming. I can feel it.”
Kahn himself comes from a Jewish- German family on his father’s side and Jewish-French on his mother’s, and says he has never experienced any antisemitism in the film industry. I mention how refreshing it is to see a film that wears its Yiddishkeit so proudly, in contrast to the likes of Oppenheimer and Maestro, in which the ethnicity of its central characters – both played by non- Jews – was so swiftly glossed over.
“It’s obvious the perception of Jewish people has changed,” replies Kahn.“Because, now, to be Jewish is to be linked to Israel, and that shouldn’t be the case.” That said, the identity of his two leading men “wasn’t my main concern”, he says. “I find it interesting if an actor can bring himself into the role. But if there had been an amazing actor who wasn’t Jewish, I would have also considered him.”
Goldman – whose girlfriend and best friends were black – accuses the entire French justice system of being racist, much to the chagrin of his legal team. “I’m a Negro, too,” he declares. “Jewish and black is the same.” I ask Kahn what the film has to say about antisemitism and anti-black racism in modern French society and institutions. “It’s an old story,” he says with a Gallic shrug. “It’s never going to go away. That’s the story of humanity.”
• The Goldman Case is in cinemas now
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