Cedric Kahn returns to the screen with a restrained, purposeful style
The stage presence of Cedric Kahn feels pared down, almost austere, yet it carries a quiet gravity. He treats the material with a calm certainty, letting the facts and the emotion breathe without embellishment. The piece revisits Pierre Goldman’s late-1960s to early-1970s arc, a controversial life defined by accusations of numerous robberies, including a fatal pharmacy crime. The focus is not on sensationalism but on the questions Goldman faced and the society that judged him.
The cast includes an actor who steps into the shoes of one of Goldman’s lawyers, Arthur Harari, who also wrote the screenplay for Anatomy of a Murder. Justine Triet’s procedural cinema makes a notable return to France, echoing influences from works like Aziz Omer: Those Against Laurence Coly, yet the approach here charts its own course, distinguishing itself from its Hollywood forebears while still engaging with classic courtroom drama.
The film’s trials unfold away from grand rhetoric and overblown suspense. Instead, directors subject the proceedings to a nearly surgical examination, dissecting every argument, gesture, and motive. This meticulous close-up invites viewers to witness the mechanics of the case from a ground-level perspective, where the truth feels both elusive and essential.
Goldman, portrayed with a blend of resolve and vulnerability, defends himself more effectively than his legal counsel seems able to. He is combative at times, and his retorts can sting, while the prosecutors speak and behave in ways that might not align with today’s standards of restraint. The drama remains tactile—an epidermal sense of pressure—yet Kahn neutralizes the tension with a steady, controlled presentation that lets the material speak for itself.
Across the hearing, Goldman’s insistence that he did not kill two women in a pharmacy robbery becomes a throughline. The prosecutors’ strategies and the police practices that surrounded him appear vulnerable to manipulation, even as the film resists easy conclusions. The narrative does not settle on Goldman’s guilt or innocence alone; it uses the courtroom as a lens through which to explore a society in crisis. It asks larger questions about mistaken judgments, the ethics of justice, and the fragile line between freedom and constraint. The portrait extends beyond the man on trial to the collective conscience that shapes, and sometimes distorts, what is deemed credible. The film thus presents not a simple verdict but a reflection on the social mechanisms that define truth in a modern penal system.