Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s new film, Bigbug, opens with a satirical scene in which a couple of enslaved human beings sniff each other’s butts. And it only gets worse from there.
His first feature in almost a decade, Bigbug might also be the once-great French auteur’s least impressive work. It’s sloppily shot, apparently put together on the cheap, and nowhere near as witty as it should have been. The scene with the enslaved humans foreshadows more of its kind—Bigbug is set in a future where machines have taken over mankind, and, in the smuggest of flexes, created a television show to ridicule humans. The show is called Homo Ridiculus, and usually involves men and women being forced to endure some sort of humiliation. Like sniffing each other’s butts. These idiosyncrasies have no bearing on the plot; they’re there just for Jeunet’s apparent amusement.
But as wide-ranging as some of the filmmaker’s fixations are, the film is unusually contained. Shot during the pandemic on what appears to be a single soundstage, Bigbug is set across one long day and night in the house of a middle-aged lady named Alice, as she finds herself locked in with several bickering acquaintances—ranging from an ex-husband, a lover, teenage kids, an annoying neighbour, and at least four well-meaning household robots.
It was the robots that, sensing an android uprising, initiated security measures and enforced lockdown. By trapping his characters in a confined space, Jeunet also corners himself as a storyteller. With nowhere to go, he’s forced to come up with innovative ways to keep the narrative chugging along, while at the same time introducing thought-provoking ideas about what it means to be human, and satirising our over-dependence on technology. Long story short, he isn’t able to.
Instead, he relies on clunky exposition dumps to explain the intricacies of the futuristic fantasy world he’s crafted. Every time someone needs a question answered, a character pulls up a large screen on which information is simply blurted out. It’s a world controlled by artificial intelligence, with self-driving cars causing traffic jams and floating billboards selling unwanted luxuries. Bugs are eaten for meals, and kids have no idea who Adolf Hitler is. I’m still not sure what the point Jeunet is trying to make here, but by God is he trying to make one.
In an interview some years ago, he admitted that nobody was willing to finance his ‘quirky’ films anymore because the industry had become risk-averse. This statement isn’t necessarily inaccurate. We all know how the film business is now dominated by franchises and IP. But perhaps what Jeunet neglected to mention was that nobody was willing to finance his script that had the word ‘Bigbug’ written on page one. Could you blame them? He said snobbishly in that interview that ‘as a last resort’, he might have to turn to Netflix.
Now, many acclaimed directors have made films for the streaming giant—Martin Scorsese, Alfonso Cuaron, Jane Campion, Noah Baumbach, Spike Lee, Charlie Kaufman, Paolo Sorrentino… The list goes on. Some of them have even been nominated for (and won) Oscars. But none of them have sounded bitter about taking their art to streaming.
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Despite his comments, Jeunet was allowed the creative freedom he needed—too much, if you ask me—to make the movie he wanted. It’s another thing that Bigbug arrives with zero publicity, cruelly dumped days after the Oscar nominations were announced, disqualified despite having been helmed by a man with two Academy Award nods to his name.
Bigbug is essentially a live-action cartoon—like one of those movies that Robert Rodriguez cranks out of his backyard every couple of years. But with a lot more sex, because, you know, it’s French. Ironically, though, it pales in comparison to an actual animated movie about a robot takeover— The Mitchell’s Vs The Machines, which deservedly scored an Oscar nod earlier this week.
Chaotic, indisciplined, and borderline unbearable, Bigbug is a pandemic project that thinks making a joke about a hypothetical Covid-50 is funny. But then again, it thinks a lot of its observations are comedy gold. Instead, it’s more like the second coming of Decoupled—an unrestrained, unstructured glimpse inside the mind of a delusional man.
Bigbug Director – Jean-Pierre Jeunet Cast – Dominique Pinon, Elsa Zylberstein, Isabelle Nanty, Youssef Hajdi, Alban Lenoir, François Levantal Rating – 1.5/5
Rohan Naahar is an assistant editor at Indian Express online. He covers pop-culture across formats and mediums. He is a 'Rotten Tomatoes-approved' critic and a member of the Film Critics Guild of India. He previously worked with the Hindustan Times, where he wrote hundreds of film and television reviews, produced videos, and interviewed the biggest names in Indian and international cinema. At the Express, he writes a column titled Post Credits Scene, and has hosted a podcast called Movie Police.
You can find him on X at @RohanNaahar, and write to him at rohan.naahar@indianexpress.com. He is also on LinkedIn and Instagram. ... Read More
A still from Bigbug, the new film from Amelie director Jean-Pierre Jeunet. (Photo: Netflix)