Rome, the seventies[1]. A middle-class family recently moved into a new modern neighborhood with their three children. The young Adriana, the eldest, will show us the scenery of the neighborhood, where she will present herself as a boy, Andrea. Drown an atmosphere full of subtlety and glimpses of beauty, she will unveil to the audience the couple condemned by the presence of the imposture of the father, Felice, husband of Clara, her mother.
In the middle of a night, Adri, hearing noises, crawls from her room to the room of her parents, where her father vehemently insists to have a sexual encounter with Clara. Every no of her mother makes Adri come closer under their bed. Every no of Clara causes another punch from her husband until the point where Adri’s scream terrifies the man, who jumps out of the bed and violently knocks over his daughter in the direction of the room of the children. Crushed, Clara, cries. Adri, shaken, expresses her rage towards her beloved mother. Felice makes his wife Clara responsible of what he considers a abhorrent education.
In L’immensità, movie directed by Italian filmmaker Emanuele Crialese, we have the figure of a father of jouissance without limits and capricious like the father of the horde. Clara’s suppressed feminity infuriates the young Adriana as she is looking for a dreamed identity, detached from the traditional pater familias.
The movie takes place in an era where the imposition by a man of his libido on a woman was not yet considered as sexism, where contemporary discourses were still in the backdrop. Felice’s jouissance is imposed on his wife and on his children for it to be a family. Without a possible universal response, Adriana opposes « the woman as pure object » – she presents herself to other as a boy – an opposition as a tentative to bring a singular response to her condition in the family, where the father has no more principles.
In this issue of Nobodaddy, Philippe De Georges and Éric Laurent shed light on our sections « The Sins of the Father » and « To do without/To make use of it » towards a possible, evoking in psychoanalysis a practice that does not aim to save daddy but to take cognizance of the dit-solution of the father in view of the clinical practice of the one by one in direction of a sinthomtic solution.
Happy screening, happy reading !
Translation : Tracy Hoijer-Favre
Proofreading : Adeena Mey
Picture: © Ambre Reddmann
[1] L’immensità, a French-Italian dramatic movie directed by Emanuele Crialese, Italy, 2022.
