The Goldman Case: this real-life courtroom showdown makes for thrilling drama

If recent French cinema has taught us anything, it’s that the nation’s murder trials resemble mixtures of rap battles and Molière plays – and if this isn’t actually the case, then frankly I don’t want to hear it. After last year’s Anatomy of a Fall comes this true-life courtroom showdown from the mid-1970s, the result and broader significance of which are well known in France itself. (Though for British audiences, a lack of foreknowledge is no bad thing.)

Those who savoured Justine Triet’s Oscar-winning drama will also find much to relish here, perhaps including the pub-quizzy connection between the two. Arthur Harari, Triet’s co-writer and partner, stars here as chief defence lawyer Georges Kiejman, whose latest client seems determined to sabotage every effort to get him off the hook.

He is Pierre Goldman (Arieh Worthalter), a far-left activist turned stick-up artist whose turn to gangsterism hasn’t dulled his populist allure. Goldman has already been found guilty of four armed robberies, to all but one of which he openly admits. But the fourth, of a pharmacy in Paris’s Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, was different, as two employees were shot dead in the process: if that conviction stands, the guillotine awaits.

So a retrial is convened – though this swaggering antihero has little intention of playing by its rules. For one thing, he refuses to call any witnesses for the defence, claiming he abhors the “pomp and theatricality” of the process – yet those two words neatly sum up his own grandiloquent manner in the dock.

The script, by director Cédric Kahn and Nathalie Hertzberg, is built with rhythm and rigour, combining elements from both of Goldman’s trials for maximum dramatic impact. And as in Anatomy of a Fall, the rhetorical back-and-forth resembles a five-way fencing bout, as the accused, the witnesses and advocates on both sides parry and thrust at one another’s claims.

Kahn never allows his filmmaking to pull focus: at times, the camerawork could almost be documentary footage. But his craft is crisp, and the supporting cast so well picked that the arrival of each witness on screen comes with the satisfying thunk-y feel of an arrow hitting its target. (I especially loved Paul Jeanson as the off-duty cop who claims to have witnessed the crime, and who increasingly loses the plot as the trial progresses.)

Behind it all, a single, telling tension twists. Both Goldman and his chief lawyer Kiejman are French-born Polish Jews – and while Kiejman has diligently carved out a space for himself in the establishment of his homeland, Goldman has railed against it, making his ethnicity a proud point of difference.

As played by Harari with great subtlety and control, Kiejman is part outraged, part ashamed: in one of just a handful of scenes not set during the trial itself, he bridles at Goldman’s description of him as what the subtitlers wittily translate as “an armchair Jew”.

As far as the film is concerned, Goldman’s guilt is beside the point: the real trial is the messy scrap in the defence between pragmatism and principle. And the outcome you find yourself rooting for – for the good of Goldman, France, and Western civilisation at large – is a dead heat.

12A cert, 116 mins. In cinemas from Sept 20