It took nearly nine years for Alain Ughetto to carry out the research, writing and production of this film in stop motion that is to say with puppets animated frame by frame according to the same technique used by a Wes Anderson in Fantastic Mr Fox. Forbidden to dogs and Italians is for the author a return to the origins of the family installation in France from Piedmont, a migration updated by a dialogue between him today, a mature man, and his grandmother in his young years, Cesira (to whom Ariane Ascaride lends his voice), but above all through this strange little jerky theater of plasticine figurines, with round eyes and as if perpetually dumbfounded, caught in the jolts of history and stubbornly seeking a better place to live and settle down. It’s a little personal story of an ancestry a priori without glory, these “tiny lives” à la Pierre Michon, appearing in the statistical tables of labor in times of peace and recruits in time of war. Alain Ughettoas he tells it in an interview, has long felt an inclination towards Italian cinema and literature that he did not specifically link to origins voluntarily silenced by the elders, who only sought to fall into line and to forget.
From then on, sets, costumes, figurines themselves are the result of a biographical collection full of silences, gaps, filled by memory and idealization. This is the strength and, let’s say it, the limit of the film. We are first seduced by an elegant gesture of craftsmanship and recycling (sugars depicting a wall, broccoli a forest, etc.) where the hand of the filmmaker is inserted into the shot to move elements. But this child’s play scenography and the tone of the story, borrowed from a slightly sweetish sentimentality, also end up creating a paradoxically suffocating atmosphere when one imagines a romantic opening, destinies struck by the singularity of the courses and of which one guesses the strong character through the few photos that the filmmaker interposes in his film. It is the relationship to the “little one” (and its corollary “the cute one”) as a traversing essence and of the lives told and of the relation to scale of the figurines which questions and which a few scenes suddenly come to contradict (the rise of fascism, a bereavement ). Michon, precisely, plays on the gap between invisible destiny and the sudden irruption of the sublime in anonymity. Conversely, Ughetto makes the fresco fit into the toy box.
