2023-09-29 13:41:04
Accused of a double murder, a robber-loser, far-left activist, risks the death penalty. Cédric Kahn reinvents the trial film for a stratospheric closed session.
This year at Cannes, there were two trial films, with Arthur Harari, the new wonderboy of French cinema, as the common denominator. One won the Palme d’Or, honors and a disgusting controversy; the other, the opening of the Directors’ Fortnight. However, the great film of this gloomy return to school is perhaps not the very overrated Autopsy of a Fall, but rather The Goldman Trial, by Cédric Kahn, an immense political film which retraces the journey of an improbable hero of the extreme left revolutionary, Pierre Goldman.
In November 1975, the second trial of Pierre Goldman began, both intellectual and eccentric, secular Jew, half-brother of Jean-Jacques Goldman, sentenced at first instance to life imprisonment for four armed robberies between 1969 and 1970 , including one leading to the death of two pharmacists. The accused pleads guilty to the three money thefts, but denies the double murder, for which he has an alibi. He wrote a book in prison (Obscure Memories of a Polish Jew born in France), became the icon of left-wing intellectuals (Simone Signoret and Régis Debray attended the trial) and the young Georges Kiejman defended him. Provocative, Goldman is incapable of defending himself without becoming embroiled, refuses to call witnesses on his behalf, sometimes confronts his lawyer and seems to forget that he faces the death penalty.
A BLACK STAR
In his screenplay, Cédric Kahn depicts an enigma, a black star. A paranoid revolutionary, a gangster desperate for heroism who would have loved nothing more than to be a Jewish resistance hero, like his father, during the Second World War. And who declares: “I am innocent because I am innocent. » But we will never know if he is guilty or truly innocent and the spectator finds himself propelled into the – delicate – place of the jury, in the darkness, for two hours.
To stage kilotons of dialogue, a multitude of speakers and bring this forgotten trial to life, Kahn relies on Jansenist sobriety. From the format of the frame to the camera movements, everything is precise and refined. And beautiful as a haiku, notably thanks to the virtuoso editing of the great Yann Dedet which runs with nuclear intensity. No tricks, no show off, Kahn films with his soul and focuses on the feverish look of Goldman, brilliantly played by Arieh Worthalter, as if possessed, and on Arthur Harari, luminous in the black dress of Maître Kiejman. We never leave the cramped courtroom but it is the reactionary France of the 1970s that comes to life, while Kahn exposes the relativity of justice, of truth. “This trial was an accurate microcosm of French society at the time, a time when justice was white and male, and in a way nothing really changed,” Kahn said. Because despite its vintage look, The Goldman Trial does indeed speak about the France of 2023, police violence, anti-Semitism, economic horror, the entertainment society, systemic racism, the chaos that is coming. As if nothing had changed…
THE GOLDMAN TRIAL
CÉDRIC KAHN
THEATERS RELEASED SEPTEMBER 27
By Marc Godin
1696007914
#Film #month #Goldman #Trial