La cicatrice dell'evaporazione del padre in "Colpire al cuore" di Gianni Amelio

The term “anni di piombo” (years of lead) is employed to refer to the time of social unrest and political terrorism that hit Italy between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. As scholarship has acknowledged (Antonello, Glynn, Lombardi, O’Leary, Uva), cinema variously dealt with such a dramatic time, becoming the privileged site of elaboration of the shocking memories associated to those years. Gianni Amelio’s “Colpire al cuore” (A Blow to the Heart), released in 1982, is one of earliest attempts to work through the experience of terrorism. Although the film came out just as Italy was facing the last attacks, in Colpire al cuore Amelio left terrorism on the background. The director was in fact more interested in representing the ‘psychological drama’ of the leaden years, seeing this time as a collective trauma affecting individuals and the bonds attaching people together. Colpire al cuore revolves in fact around three father-son relationships. The first is between a university professor, Dario, and his adolescent son Emilio. While Dario supports, and possibly directly collaborates, with a terrorist organization, Emilio, in the desperate search for an authoritative and law-abiding father, does not hesitate to report his suspicious activities to the police. The second relationship is a form of ideological fatherhood, which sees Dario acting as a father for his student Sandro, a young terrorist who dies in an attack in Milan right at the beginning of the film. The third is instead a missed relationship, that between Sandro and his new-born baby, who is doomed to not even remember his father prematurely killed by the police.
My contribution sets out to examine the ‘inverted’ Oedipal rivalry between Dario and Emilio through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis. By reading their relationship in light of the notion of the ‘evaporated father’ the chapter demonstrates that Amelio portrays in his film two orphans and two dead fathers, who sacrifice their fatherhood for the sake of political ideals. As a result, I interpret Colpire al cuore as a film that, by challenging the traditional way of representing generational conflicts, denounces the eclipse of a ‘functioning’ paternal authority in the Years of Lead. Dysfunctional, absent, and dead fathers trigger in their sons the desperate desire for tyrannical expressions of ideological fatherhood: the blind belief in the State and its law, for Emilio; the obsessive dedication to ‘the Cause’ of armed terrorism for Sandro. Colpire al cuore reassesses therefore the notions of ‘trauma’ and ‘victim’ as employed in the traditional narrative surrounding Italy’s Years of Lead, shedding light on the many different ways terrorism damaged, and even destroyed, family bonds.