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Departures, arrivals, connections. Trains and train stations feature significantly throughout Gianni Amelio's affecting film, The Keys to the House [Le chiavi di casa, ], in which young father, Gianni (Kim Rossi Stuart), meets 15 year-old Paolo (Andrea Rossi), the disabled son he abandoned at birth when the boy's mother died. It may be no accident that the father in the film shares his name, Gianni, with writer and director Gianni Amelio who fathered the film. And it is a satisfying coincidence that ‘Rossi’ occurs in the name of both the main actors playing the estranged father and son. This is a film about bonding and making connections but never glibly so. Amelio forces his characters and the viewers of the film to recognize the impossibility of being a perfect parent, especially when faced with the task of parenting a child with a disability which has labelled them, from the start, ‘imperfect’. Amelio composes many of his shots obliquely which work to accentuate a sense of uncertainty in the viewer. Through Gianni and Paolo's story we are invited, uncomfortably at times, to face our own weaknesses and fears, and to consider the question of responsibility that lies at the heart of every relationship between parent and child.
In the opening scene we see Alberto (Pierfrancesco Faviono) at a bar in an Italian train station drinking coffee. With him is Gianni. The two men sit for a while in awkward silence as the muted sounds of the station noises and conversations go on around them. Alberto, who we learn is Paolo's uncle, has brought the boy as far as Milan where Gianni is waiting and will meet his teenage son for the first time.
“How old was he here?” Gianni asks, looking at a photograph while the train, with the real boy asleep on it, is idling in the station. “Does he look like me?” Gianni is looking for something to ameliorate his feelings of guilt, some way of connecting in advance of the meeting which he is both longing for and dreading. “No,” says the brother-in