Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s latest, Bigbug is a science fiction outing coming to us courtesy of Netflix. No, stop, come back, this one might not be awful, bringing their running total to one. After all, Jean-Pierre Jeunet gave us the likes of City of Lost Children and Amelie. There’s surely some benefit of the doubt left, even accounting for Alien Resurrection?
Bigbug rattles us forward twenty to thirty years to a suburbia that’s at once very different and much the same as now, with rows of very externally similar looking homes encasing a lot of the same human dramas as we have today, just with added robot helpers, from the likes of the simple cleaning and surveillance drones, to Claude Perron’s Monique, the robot maid, or the entirely evil looking and much more advanced Yonyx android things, played by a cross between François Levantal and a set of sentient oversized dentures, who definitely aren’t going to overthrown humanity and imprison them.
Oh no! They’ve overthrown humanity and imprisoned them, locking people in their homes. One such home belongs to Elsa Zylberstein’s Alice, recently divorced, who had been hosting her new lover, Stéphane De Groodt’s Max and his son Hélie Thonnat’s Léo, when her ex, Youssef Hajdi’s Victor shown up to bring their adopted daughter, Marysol Fertard’s Nina home, with his new lover slash old secretary Claire Chust’s Jennifer in tow. Added to this clearly volatile mix is their neighbour Isabelle Nanty’s Françoise, visiting when the doors seal.
As such, after our brief introduction to the characters the rest of the narrative is broadly, or perhaps nominally, driven by the human’s attempts to escape their home, although mostly it is about exploring the character interactions that swing between charming, prickly, annoying and amusing in more or less equal proportions. There’s also a B-plot where the house robots, not part of the Yonix rebellion, decide to become more human in order to appear less threatening to our cast, led in this endeavour by Victor’s old AI creation, Einstein, voiced by André Dussollier.
So, a lot of this is less about the dangers of artificial intelligence and instead about what it means to be human, and what is worthwhile about the human experience in this world that’s in a lot of the more important senses not all that far extrapolated from our current one. How much it has to say about it at the end of the day is rather up for debate, but at least the effort is appreciated.
I’m perhaps surprised to see how negatively received this has been, admittedly just by looking at aggregate star ratings and the like. I suspect any review of more than a couple of sentences will acknowledge the same things I’m going to, like the strong directorial style and visuals that instantly mark this out as a Jeunet film. Shallow as it is, there’s not many scenes in this film that aren’t visually interesting, particularly the lovely details on Einstein, or the overarching weirdness of the Yonix, and their obvious joy taken in humiliation humans on what’s implied to be a long-running TV show, which you’d think might have clued people into their intentions a little sooner. Anyway for an alleged budget of $13 million, this looks great, with only a few ropy CG flourishes betraying that frugality.
The question I was left immediately after watching this was, essentially, “what was that trying to be”, and I’m not altogether sure that’s the right question to be asking of it. There’s certainly enough angles of attack to level at Bigbug – if it’s a character piece, there’s not enough characterisation, if it’s a drama narrative, there’s not enough happening, if it’s a comedy, there’s not enough laughs, if it’s about the world building, there’s not enough being told. It’s a lot easier to point at the stools it has fallen between than identify exactly where it is, and part of me wishes I had enjoyed it less so I could say it’s left floating with the stools, so I will make a note of that for future less-likeable hot messes.
Still, I can’t give a full throated recommendation to Bigbug, particularly if you’re not already a fan of Jeunet’s almost cartoonish style and whimsy. I, however, am, and so this coasts quite far on charm alone, even if it’s not his finest outing. In that regard, the middling to negative review scores are I suppose accurate, but if you have Netflix already I’d encourage you to give this one a look-in. You might not think it to be quite your cup of tea, but it’s worth taking a swig of to find out for sure.