As we enter Year Three of the COVID-19 pandemic, so too begins Year Two of COVID Cinema. Of course, all movies produced since 2020 have been made under the obstructions and protocols of the pandemic, but the COVID Movie is something specific: stripped down, shot under quarantine (in spirit if not in fact), with characters grappling directly or obliquely with isolation and the bad mojo of our times. Give or take a Host, most of these films have been little more than trifles, but they’re probably an essential component of the healing process, and if enough of them are made we’ll maybe have enough to program a decent retrospective series in 2030.
The latest entry in the ongoing Corona Film Festival comes courtesy of French whimsy-monger Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amelie). As one might expect, Jeunet has crafted one of the more unusual films to come out of the COVID cycle, but while Bigbug has its share of charms, it is ultimately nearly as exhausting as the lockdown itself.
Bigbug is set in the year 2045, where our current vogue for corporate AI has been taken to the extreme. Alice (Elsa Zylberstein) is as resistant to technology as she can be– she collects books and outmoded tech, and practices calligraphy in her spare time– but the home she shares with teenage daughter Nina (Marysole Fertard) is still controlled by a voice-activated digital assistant and staffed by a team of helpful robots, led by the humanoid Monique (Claude Perron). Alice already has her hands full entertaining male suitor Max (Stéphane de Groodt) and his son Leo (Hélie Thonnat) when they are interrupted by her ex-husband Victor (Youssef Hajdi), his new girlfriend Jennifer (Claire Chust), and nosey neighbor Francoise (Isabelle Nanty). Things take a turn, however, when an apocalyptic traffic jam triggers an automatic lockdown, trapping the motley crew inside the dubiously “smart” house. The robots, meanwhile, find themselves in an existential crisis, trying to prove their trustworthiness by cracking what it means to be “human.” Oh, and the outside world is controlled by a terrifying, Borg-like race of cybermen known as the Yonyx, who make it clear that all of this techno-chaos is simply part of the plan.
Like most of Jeunet’s films, Bigbug carries itself with such manic enthusiasm that it’s hard for me to completely dislike it. The film’s futuristic setting gives Jeunet room to play with a brand new toybox full of gadgets and Rube Goldberg devices; early on in the film, Monique prepares dinner in minutes with the aid of a series of Swiss Army-style finger attachments. The design of the robots is inspired (Einstein, a skittering, steampunk-inspired facsimile of the eponymous physicist’s head, is a standout). And the cast is more than game, particularly Perron as the ever-chipper robot maid. In a world where theatrical films and streaming fare alike are often samey and algorithmically streamlined, it’s nice to come across a film with this level of invention and energy.
But a little bit of that energy goes a long way, and at nearly two hours Bigbug becomes something of an endurance test. The unwieldy cast of characters– seven humans, five sentient robots, and an interloping Yonyx– all begin the movie at 10 and never dial back the energy level, careening wild-eyed from one set piece to the next. What’s more, they never stop talking, leaving little room for the lyrical passages which lend Jeunet’s better films so much of their charm. Bigbug may be about the claustrophobia of being stuck inside with family members who drive you crazy, but it perhaps sells that feeling a little too well.
Likewise, while Bigbug is plainly a critique of modern digital technology, it is also a victim of it. Like fellow ‘90s fabulist Tim Burton, the transition from practical effects to CGI has robbed Jeunet’s whimsical aesthetic of much of its appeal. The tactile, homemade pleasures of Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children are difficult to recreate in ones and zeroes, particularly given the relatively paltry budget generally afforded to an idiosyncratic oddball auteur. This is compounded by the Netflix house style– digital photography, tinny sound design, lighting garish enough to play on a tablet (it also feels like a bit of unintentional meta-commentary to watch this satire of digital consumer culture on that most dystopian of all streaming platforms, with pop-up ads for Don’t Look Up and The Tinder Swindler pushed in your face the second the credits roll). The result looks less like something one might see in an arthouse theater in the 1990s and more like something you’d play on a CD-ROM.
Still, I do have to give Jeunet credit for not making just another Zoom movie. By setting Bigbug in the future, one might not initially realize that it is a COVID Film; only an elbow-bump of greetings in the first act (and occasional ring light reflections in the actors’ eyes) tips the viewer off to the circumstances of its production. In addition to the obvious swipes at modern technology and the various tiny hells of “shelter in place,” the gleefully sadistic, authoritarian Yonyx are clear stand-ins for the far-right demagogues who have risen to power in the past decade (in one of the film’s sharpest gags, the characters watch a televised political debate, in which an ineffectual liberal candidate blithely carries on as if his opponent is an actual human politician rather than an openly evil kill-bot; “I like his ideas,” Victor’s dim girlfriend says of the Yonyx). It’s a dire state of affairs when even the director of Amelie feels pressed to weigh in on the creeping tide of fascism, but that’s where we’ve been for a while now.
Again, I feel bad coming on too harshly against a film this original and agreeably daffy, but the fact is that Bigbug wore me out with its hyperactive energy, jarring aesthetic, and sluggish, overstuffed story. I still like Jeunet, and the fact that a filmmaker so offbeat can still lock down a mid-sized budget once in a while does give me some hope (even if the resulting film is subsequently dumped onto Netflix with little to no fanfare). But I can’t quite bring myself to recommend Bigbug, except maybe in a few more manageable installments. Bigbug may stand as one of the more interesting COVID Films to date, but like the pandemic itself, I eventually found myself wondering when it was going to end.
Bigbug
2022
dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet
111 min.
Streaming on Netflix starting Friday, 2/11
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