[Netflix] BigBug: the future seen by an outdated filmmaker

Bad pick for Netflix in the pursuit of a strategy to attract authors to the platform: Jeunet sold them with BigBug which is probably his worst film!

No one is fooled by the generosity of Netflix towards certain filmmakers: attracting authors into the stable by financing them what the producers refuse them allows a qualitative recruitment which will be able to attract the cinephile fringe of an audience which still resist them. So Jean-Pierre Jeunetwhich hasn’t filmed since the box office failure of T.S. Spivet 9 years ago, and which has not succeeded in convincing the historical partners as to the feasibility of its new project, a futuristic dystopia where robots would take power in a suburban residence in 2045. We know the the director’s appetite for technology, innovations and his taste for burlesque since his experiences with Marc Caro. Sci-fi, caricature and somewhat gritty comedy indeed seemed to be summoned for this new experience, in which the artistic direction justifies a significant part of the budget. This colorful retrofuturist seduces on the first sequences, just before the actors have the bad idea to open their mouths.

Come to think of it, the opening sequence set the tone: a show of robots walking around humans sniffing their crotches with recorded laughter, called “unfunny” by humans who don’t understand the clumsy warning that has just been imposed on them.

BigBug is a generalized disaster, which attempts to present biases wallowing one after another as voluntary. One could at the limit understand the idea of ​​this overplay, frequent in Jeunet, to illustrate a humanity in the process of peremption seeking in vain to satisfy its desires. But the machine runs on empty from the start, through laborious dialogues, a forceps exhibition that catalogs all the failings of home automation excess, and locks the viewer into a vaudeville behind closed doors that will quickly turn into a nightmare. The filmmaker seems to think that this confinement is sufficient in itself, and justifies the total absence of stake for a series of embarrassing scenes where we play pee-pee over three generations, worrying more about the malfunction of the air conditioning than of the fate of humanity. Dystopia, which would like to summon the reflections of Blade Runner and the dark farce of Brazil, is confined to clichés of confounding laziness where an ugly droid castigates humanism by burning books. The domestic robots, meanwhile, question the very essence of humanity, taking up the sauce “Madame is served” the mythological themes formerly addressed by great filmmakers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWcqH7orROc

The artificiality of all this crude comedy ends up having consequences for the general perception of the film. Thus this gallery of robots which, we learn, are physically constructed, including Einstein’s superb head, a mechanical assembly of wood and metal driven by more than 80 motors. Their interaction with actors with mechanical participation and their dilution within an artistic direction exhibiting such artificiality makes them pass for CGI creations, deactivating what the author was able to breathe into them in creativity.

But the film becomes really problematic by the residues of speech which end up surviving from this inept jumble, whether in the outdated slang of the teenager, the Copernican revolution worthy of a copy of 6th grade between man and animal or the vision proposed family comedy where the young bimbo hottie with a neuron ends up with the naughty fucker while bobonne and makes the ex future ex pot-bellied in the row. Retrofuturism is therefore not only about artistic direction: BigBug is an embarrassing satire of anticipation seen by a man of the past, and a sadly outdated filmmaker.

Sergeant Pepper

BigBug
French film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet
With: Stéphane De Groodt, Elsa Zylberstein, Alban Lenoir…
Genre: Comedy, SF
Duration: 1h51
Release date (Netflix): February 11, 2022

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