Do you remember being nineteen?

"Better Call Saul"... Qui a vu "Breaking Bad" se souvient évidemment du slogan employé par l'avocat Saul Goodman. Il aura donné son nom à la série spin-off, centrée sur ce personnage (et, dans une moindre mesure, sur Mike Ehrmantraut). Six ans les faits aujourd'hui connus, on assiste donc à la génèse de Saul Goodman, personnage haut en couleur : touchant, travailleur, humble (et flamboyant), juste (honnête... à sa manière), drôle...

Au final, la série pourrait faire penser à une sorte de mash-up entre Ally McBeal et un Perry Mason burlesque, le tout dans l'univers de Breaking Bad. Savoureux.

Voici une plaidoirie extraite du tout premier épisode.

Oh, to be nineteen again! You with me, ladies and gentlemen? Do you remember nineteen? Let me tell you, the juices are flowing. The red corpuscles are corpuscling, the grass is green, and it's soft, and summer's gonna last forever.... ... Now, do you remember? Yeah, you do. But if you're being honest...I mean, well, really honest, you'll recall that you also had an underdeveloped nineteen-year-old brain. Me, personally, I...it...If I were held accountable for some of the stupid decisions I made when I was nineteen... Oh, boy, wow. And I bet if we were in church right now, I'd get a big "amen!"


Which brings us to these three... Now, these three knuckleheads. And I'm sorry, boys, but that's what you are. They did a dumb thing. We're not denying that. However, I would like you to remember two salient facts. Fact one: nobody got hurt, not a soul. Very important to keep that in mind. Fact two: Now, the prosecution keeps bandying this term "criminal trespass." Mr. Spinowzo, the property owner, admitted to us that he keeps most portions of his business open to the public both day and night. So, trespassing? That's a bit of a reach, don't you think, Dave? Here's what I know: These three young men, near honors students all, were feeling their oats one Saturday night, and they just went a little bananas. I don't know. Call me crazy, but I don't think they deserve to have their bright futures ruined by a momentary, minute, never-to-be-repeated lapse of judgment. Ladies and gentlemen, you're bigger than that.

S'en suivra la projection par le procureur d'une vidéo awkward tournée... dans une morgue. Je n'en dis pas plus.

Better Call Saul, Uno

(Vince Gilligan, Peter Gould : 2015)

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Cette plaidoirie m'a rappelé l'un des arguments employé par le père de Broke Turner, cet étudiant "modèle" qui avait violé une étudiante inconsciente sur le campus de Stanford. Cette affaire avait fait grand bruit en 2016 [wikipedia], dans la mesure où elle mettait en lumière des comportements trop souvent tus sur les campus américains, et, de manière plus large, illustrait la "culture du viol".

Au final, Broke Turner aura donc été condamné pour les chefs d'inculpation : 

- Assault with intent to rape an intoxicated woman,

- Sexually penetrating an intoxicated person with a foreign object

- Sexually penetrating an unconscious person with a foreign object

Craignant que la condamnation résultante (notamment son inscription au registre des délinquants sexuels) n'hypothèque l'avenir de son fils, le père, Dan Turner, écrivit au procureur une lettre, dans laquelle figuraient les propos suivants :

“His life will never be the one that he dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve. That is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life.”

J'en reviens donc à Jimmy (Better Call Sall) : "I don't think they deserve to have their bright futures ruined by a momentary, minute, never-to-be-repeated lapse of judgment". La différence? Il précisait, peu avant :

"Nobody got hurt, not a soul."