Search

Where to Stream:

Bigbug

Huzzah to Netflix for giving French surrealist-auteur Jean-Pierre Jeunet a platform for his new achievement in weirdness, Bigbug, his first feature in nine years. You may know Jeunet for his effervescent melancholy-pop Oscar nominee Amélie, his sellout movie Alien: Resurrection, or possibly even 1991 debut and sub-cult classic Delicatessen, a movie that blends sweetness and grotesquerie like no other. Like the latter, Bigbug is a dystopian satire, albeit for the smarthome era, and it’s chock-full of the cuckoo comedy and uber-styled visual sensibility that are his hallmarks. Sounds good on paper, doesn’t it? But in execution, well, that might be another story.

‘BIGBUG’: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It’s 2045. There are finally flying cars and robot maids – and flooded Netherlands and floating drones that observe people at the same time they spew advertisements. Gotta take the good with the bad, I guess, as ever, right? Alice (Elsa Zylberstein) lives in a French suburb where all the houses look alike, but at least they look fab as f—, mid-century modern for the mid-21st-century, because everything old is new again. She’s a cultural anomaly who still collects those things, you know, whaddayacallem, books, and loves to write words longhand with ink and paper like they did oh so long ago. Her potential beau, Max (Stephane De Groot), is aroused by such ornate calligraphy, although he could be faking it, because his primary objective is to get up Alice’s dress. She either buys into his faux-intellectualism or ignores it, but either way, she too wouldn’t mind getting some. They’re middle-aged divorcees, they’re horny, they’re consenting, so hey, go for it, although they’re goofy enough that, you know, maybe we don’t need to watch?

Anyway, Max is at Alice’s house with his teenage son Leo (Helie Thonnat) in tow, and the kid’s too blasé to be mortified by the rampant libidos of his elders. Not that anyone’s ever alone in this reality, because Nestor is the Alexa-like invisible presence in people’s homes, the entity with a voice who you ask to unlock doors and turn on lights. There’s a crew in every home now: In Alice’s, Monique (Claude Perron) is the humanoid maid who does laundry, preps meals and uses her sensors to detect the state of Max’s sincerity (“3%”) and erection (“100%”) via digital readouts that only she, and we, can see. Einstein is a decapitated head-contraption that spiders around like Google on multiple legs; there’s a cleanup droid that vacuums and spritzes and looks like it fell off MST3K’s Satellite of Love; and there’s a cute little one that entertained Alice’s daughter when she was young.

The scheduled dropoff of said daughter, Nina (Marysold Fertard), results in awkward interactions among Max, Alice, her ex-husband Victor (Youssef Hadji) and his fiancee/secretary Jennifer (Claire Chust). Dropping by to spice the brew is Alice’s neighbor Francoise (Isabelle Nanty), hoping to retrieve the eighth clone of her accident-prone dog, and her “sports” bot Greg (Alban Lenoir), who we soon learn is actually her sex bot. And then the doors won’t unlock and the air conditioning won’t turn on, because apparently the singularity is happening, and Monique and co., disconnected from the AI insurrection, want to keep their owners safe. So they’re all stuck with each other, watching TV, which shows the French version of Ow My Balls (it’s called Homo Ridiculous) or a debate between a human and the prevailing ruler of this reality, Yonyx (Francois Levantal), of whom there are many, all with terrifying yellow-green eyes, teeth out to here and stomping around like RoboCop. The indoor automatons aren’t affiliated with Yonyx; in fact, they’d rather be human, so they try to emulate their owners by reading books and such, although they never shtoink each other, which is what said owners are frequently trying to do.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Imagine Delicatessen crossed with Idiocracy and The Jetsons, and you’re in the ballpark.

Performance Worth Watching: In a cast of characters who show little depth or personality, one of the robots stands out: Playing Monique, Perron is the only one who stirs up much in the way of effective comedy.

Memorable Dialogue: Leo spits some slang: “Mecas have taken over the dacha. We’ve been doofussed.”

Sex and Skin: Sexy lingerie; spanking; a few doinking iterations; lady toplessness.

Our Take: As always, Jeunet hits the sweet spot between artsy weirdness and whimsical charm. But as its increasingly sweaty protagonists try to outwit their charming robot captors – so they can apparently escape to the freedom of AI totalitarianism? I think that’s one of the jokey ironies here – Bigbug ends up being a mishmash of broad comedy and scattered ideas. The human characters are shallow nincompoops, obsessed with maintaining life’s conveniences (climate control, vacation) or satisfying their concupiscent urges. The house bots want to be like them, which would absolutely make them stupider, and I think that’s one of the other jokey ironies here.

That dichotomy alone would be a concept worth honing into a sharp internet-of-things satire spiced with sex comedy, especially considering how Jeunet siphons the narrative into a single location. But the filmmaker’s ambition spurts through cracks in the foundation, indulging political commentary, bureaucracy jokes and the ineffectual overarching plot about humanity’s inevitable enslavement – despite the characters’ rampant urges to scrump, there’s not much in the way of dramatic tension or release, which is one of the movie’s unintentional jokey ironies. It’s ultimately too broad and silly, the comedy landing here and there (I liked the throwaway one-liner about certain cheeses that have been banned for being “non-nutritionally correct”), but most of the gags are dragged out and toothless. It’s visually inspired, a pleasure to look at, but tonally, it rarely rises above grating and repetitive farce.

Our Call: Bigbug is a disappointing mishmash of dopey humor masking smart ideas – and a misfire for Jeunet. SKIP IT.