The week’s cinema releases with Thierry Fiorile and Matteu Maestracci: “The Goldman Trial” by Cédric Kahn and “Club Zero” by Jessica Hausner.
In The Goldman trial by Cédric Kahn, We are in 1976, and the accused, Pierre Goldman, is a legendary figure of the French far left. An elusive character, as much an activist as a thug, a brilliant dialectician, son of heroes of the resistance, Jews from Central Europe, who arrived in France before the war.
Passing through Latin America in full revolutionary turmoil, Pierre Goldman is accused of the murder of two pharmacists in Paris in 1969. Sentenced to life in prison the first time, the judgment is overturned, he is retried in Amiens, he proclaims his innocence, while recognizing the robberies, supported by the left-wing intelligentsia of the time, Simone Signoret at the head, and defended by the young Georges Kiejman, not yet the brilliant lawyer he would become.
Pierre Goldman is an untenable client for his defender, and it is this pairing, this opposition of personalities which makes the success of the film. Arieh Worthalter is Pierre Goldman, Arthur Harari Georges Kiejman. They are incredibly realistic, as is the climate of the trial, this closed-door theater remarkably filmed.
The word is flesh, it is the vibration of this film, which is careful not to impose an opinion on Pierre Goldman. The character retains his complexity, he will be acquitted, then assassinated in 1979. A little-known far-right group claims responsibility for the attack, the culprits will never be identified, the Goldman mystery remains unsolved.
Club Zero by Jessica Hausner
Film presented in competition at the last Cannes Film Festival, Club Zero takes us in the footsteps of Miss Novak, a young teacher who arrives in a private establishment for the ultra-rich, with the aim of providing voluntary students with nutrition lessons.
Rather trashy and radical vision of our Western and contemporary societies, Club Zero wants to denounce our faults, and a certain extremism on environmental and food issues, the program presented by the professor leading little by little to a total fast, without any food on now empty plates, with of course the dangers for health that this implies.
There is in Jessica Hausner an obsessive desire to control her image, her setting, her staging, which can suggest that nuance has no place in her film, yet we come away with more questions than answers on this eco-anxious, radical youth, but like all youth ultimately.
The era is binary, but the film is not, despite appearances. This is a contemporary version of the tale The Pied Piper of Hamelin, German legend by the Brothers Grimm, a successful metaphor for the possible manipulation of youth in search of meaning.