La Lezione

 

Make visible what without you could not be seen.
— Robert Bresson 

The theme is of absolute urgency. Defending a man accused of sexual assault is not merely a professional duty: it is an ethical passage. The lawyer finds herself in that gray area where law and conscience do not always coincide. The film perceptively senses this fracture: the law requires that anyone be guaranteed defense; conscience, at times, wavers. In this sense, the work captures a real, burning tension concerning the survival and quality of life of women exposed to harassment, persecution, and assault. 

And yet, precisely when the subject matter grows densest, the narrative succumbs to the aesthetic of emphasis. 

Contemporary Italian cinema often seems to have a weakness for moral abstraction. It constructs imposing thematic scaffolds, raises decisive questions—the violence against women, stalking, the role of lawyers in sexual crime trials—and then, almost carelessly, stumbles over the concrete details. La Lezione is no exception. 

The protagonist progressively becomes the victim of a persecutory obsession that isolates her, destabilizes her, makes her vulnerable. 
The problem is not the narrative choice—in fact, the parallel between defending the accused and experiencing personal threat could have been powerful. The problem lies in the execution. 

Many sequences inhabit a territory of obvious implausibility. One cannot help but ask—with a hint of inevitable irony—why so much cinema continues to have adult bodies moved as if they were mere sacks of sand. Can a person of the professor’s build really be dragged with relative ease by a slight female frame? And above all: why insist on physically improbable actions when the psychological tension alone would suffice? 

Realism is not a technical detail. It is the minimal condition for believing in the drama. If the body becomes weightless against all evidence, the moral conflict is likewise lightened. 

Adding to this is the protagonist’s conduct. A criminal lawyer, accustomed to media pressure and the risks inherent in delicate cases, reacts to events with a vulnerability that is sometimes excessive, sometimes incoherent. In crucial situations, her choices often appear driven more by the need to escalate tension than by plausible professional ethics and the legal competence to measure responsibility and consequences. 

It is legitimate to ask: would a woman with that training, that expertise, that forensic clarity really act this way? 

The film seems to suggest that no one is impervious to fear. And this is true. But between human fragility and narrative overreach there exists a thin threshold. Here, that threshold is often exceeded. 

It must be acknowledged that the performances are solid, measured, emotionally credible. The actors manage to give depth to characters that the writing sometimes simplifies. Certain elements—the ambiguity of public gaze, the professional’s isolation, the suspicion that seeps like a crack in rationality—are genuinely interesting. 

But they are not enough. 

Because the film remains anchored in a plane of implausibility that ultimately undermines the entire structure. A thriller requires suspension of disbelief; here, the viewer is asked to suspend it too long, too often. 

And so an ambiguous sensation lingers: a work that tackles a socially decisive theme, that addresses a crucial knot of our time—the violence, stalking, and legal defense of the accused—but fails to embody it within a coherent narrative structure. 

As if the “lesson” evoked in the title remained unfinished. 

Perhaps the real question is not who is right in the trial, but why cinema, when dealing with such urgent themes, forgets that plausibility is not a narrative accessory: it is the very condition of credibility, of acknowledging realities that cannot simply be reduced to a spectacular device. 

“Reality is always right.”
— Pier Paolo Pasolini