Jeunet’s old blow? 🤖

With his iconoclastic style, Jean-Pierre Jeunet is one of those directors who are carefully watched for each of their projects, as he has taken to surprising us, and often in a good way. It must be said that when you are able to sign in quick succession The City of Lost Children, Alien, the Resurrection (yes yes) and The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain, there is already enough to build a solid reputation as a touch. -to everyone who likes to think outside the box. Except that with the commercial failure of his latest feature, L’Extravagant voyage by the young and prodigious TS Pivet, the director had disappeared from the radar. Until Netflix unveiled BigBug.

We are in 2045 and humanity has developed artificial intelligence to the point that it has become essential for the smallest task, such as opening a door. And while outside, an army of robots, the Yonyx, take power over humans, a group of individuals find themselves trapped in a house by domestic robots, determined to protect them in spite of themselves.

For the record, it seems that before landing on Netflix, BigBug’s pitch was refused by many production companies, young as he was. It then took the streaming platform (SVoD), known for giving complete freedom to its star directors, for the film to see the light of day. Advantage for the filmmaker, rid of the safeguard producer whose role was at times to put him back in the nails when the artistic vision went beyond the frame. The other side of the coin is that without this limitation, when faced with the final result, the spectator sometimes no longer really knows what he is looking at. And it is in this gray area that BigBug slips.

The future in the past

Before deploying our opinion, it is worth recalling an essential element of the criticism which is of great importance here: it is inherently subjective. It is based on arguments, but it remains nonetheless the vision of its author, his appreciation of the work. A necessary reminder as BigBug presents itself as a curiosity that risks attracting as many defenders as detractors. For our part, we are more in the second category.

There is something young in this film, that’s for sure. His taste for close-ups, his work on the bodies of his actors to express intentions in text and image, this colorimetry… BigBug is Jean-Pierre who makes Jeunet with the generosity of a kid. Although the footage takes place behind closed doors, it embraces science fiction with the richness of detail, from the thousand-and-one sets to the design of its robots. In a suburban house where everything looks alike, no one element is the same as the next.

Nevertheless, this permanent swarming consisting in creating a world where the artificial reigns supreme perhaps achieves its objective too well: we never believe in it. From the generous, we pass to the superfluous, to the superficial. Nothing feels tangible, everything tastes like plastic. BigBug is not so much a film as a display case of a 1970 fair assuming the world of 2000. We imagine the future in the past.

A feeling that spreads to his obvious denunciation of transhumanism, our dependence on technology, or even the health crisis and government decisions. We understand the point, but there is nothing innovative about it. Other films of the genre pointed out our same flaws years before, only much better. In wanting to scratch capitalist society, Jean-Pierre Jeunet falls into the trap of the big string by being as subtle and fine as a Renaud singing about the Coronavirus. It’s intended to be squeaky, it’s above all embarrassing.

BigBug in the Matrix

From the introduction, BigBug warns: rid of their ability to manage themselves, humans have become animals subject to their lowest instincts. In his enterprise of dehumanizing society, the director brings together an exceptional cast (Elsa Zylberstein, Stéphane De Groodt, Youssef Hajdi, etc.) to make caricatures of them. We can say that the result exceeds expectations.

We end up with actors who pretend to be misdirected so well that the ridicule becomes credible. Far from satire or parody, we have more the impression of falling into the nanar where each character recites his text and moves on to the next. Everyone overplays or misplays in a kind of exhausting collective hysteria for the eyes and the ears. Apart from the androids played divinely by Claude Perron and François Levantal, impossible to immerse yourself in the atmosphere as we deeply wish the death of each occupant of this house of hell.

And that’s where BigBug’s worst punishment for a weary viewer comes in: its duration. For 1h50, the very feature film opts for a cutting in sketches where couples have hormones and stupidity on fire, as if we were stuck in an elongated version of Scenes of household, humor in less. The farce is endless.

Whether in his comedy or in his satire, BigBug misses everything, almost voluntarily. We can’t tell if it’s Jean-Pierre Jeunet or us, but one of the two has clearly become too old for this bullshit.