Your Honor: The ending betrays the original and lacks courage

When we learned that Rai would make a new version of Your Honor we immediately wondered, as admirers of the American remake as we are, if the public service would have left the shocking and unexpected ending of the original intact. And that’s why, after seeing the latest installment of Your honourwe were a little disappointed. Disappointed because, had he remained faithful to the development of the story, Your honour would have created a not indifferent precedent for Rai: to propose to its public a strong, violent epilogue, perhaps the only one necessary to explain in detail the madness of a magistrate who, in an attempt to protect the son responsible for the murder of the son of a boss of the underworld, he stains himself with a series of unspeakable crimes by renouncing that sense of justice and morality that he had pursued and professed all his life. Instead, that shattering gloss leaves room for a decidedly softer and, if we can, less courageous farewell, and we regret this.

We are sorry because, in Your Honor, after all the attempts and lies told to protect the credibility of the child, Judge Michael Desiato played by Bryan Cranston is forced to witness, helplessly, the death of his son Adam, which in fact closes a very tortuous path in the name of silence, demonstrating, both to Desiato and to the public, that protection is valid up to a certain point, and that life, when humanity gets soaked with so serious sins for survive, can only present a very high bill to be paid off. In Your honour, instead, the direction is completely different: Matteo (Matteo Oscar Giuggioli), in spite of his father’s attempts to protect him and hide his guilt, decides to turn himself in making the sacrifices of Judge Vittorio Pagani, played by Stefano Accorsi, in fact, vain, emptied of any meaning.

Hence Pagani’s decision to renounce the position of chairman of the commission he aspired to since the first episode, explaining that he cares more for his son than for his career. A choice that might make sense, but that doesn’t even have a quarter of the disruptive power of Your Honor, who managed to represent the smallness of man so well in front of a bigger plan and that mantra that says that people who are not correct, at the end of the games, ruin themselves because it is right that they are. Beyond this muffled ending, Your honour, produced by Rai Fiction in collaboration with Indiana Production, managed to propose a legal drama on Rai1 enhanced by the presence of Accorsi, who, thanks to his interpretation, perfectly represented the sense of anguish and apprehension of a father who until the day before had all the certainties only to find himself, at any moment, with no more references to follow, at the mercy of an emotional storm that could only be extinguished with its dissolution.

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