Bigbug review: Netflix’s sci-fi comedy turns a robot uprising into French farce

The best way to show huge, earth-shattering happenings is to limit the view. It’s cheaper to make a Shaun of the DeadMore than just a World War ZHowever, narrowing the focus allows high-concept issues to be recast on a more human scale with higher stakes. By keeping the story short, filmmakers make up in drama for what they lose in spectacle. Maybe that’s why Netflix’s Bigbug, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s French sci-fi comedy about a robot uprising, never leaves the confines of one suburban house. Perhaps it was just an inexpensive way to film a movie during a crisis. Bigbug’s characters aren’t trying to overthrow their robot overlords. They’re just trying to get outside.

Bigbug is something of a comeback for Jeunet — his first feature film since 2013’s T.S. Young and Prodigious Spivet. Jeunet’s most famous work is AmélieThis sugary-sweet, romantic fairytale charmed the globe in 2001. But in the ’90s, with collaborator Marc Caro, he trained his whimsical eye and wide-angle lenses on more grotesque subjects, for the bizarre Alien ResurrectionAnd the dark fairytale The City of Lost Children.

These were his first cult-acclaim. DelicatessenA Rube Goldberg invention of a movie about a retro post-apocalypse that follows the residents of one crumbling apartment block. Delicatessen staged the intricate, near-wordless slapstick of Jacques Tati in a messy Terry Gilliam fantasy world, and Jeunet’s camera dissected the spaces of the apartment building like a leering, untidy version of Wes Anderson. (Delicatessen is streaming on the Criterion Channel, and it’s well worth catching.)

Photo: Bruno Calvo/Netflix

The confined locale, the antic ensemble cast and the dystopian vibes make it a unique setting. BigbugThis is Jeunet’s closest film to his movie. But under the skin, it’s quite different. It’s less of a silent film comedy and more of a theatrical farce, and though the ideas behind its sci-fi setting are more clearly set out, they don’t mesh so well with the action.

The 2045 year is the last time humans will be able to control their own lives. Alice (Elsa Zylberstein), a former divorcee who is a retro fan and owns books, is waited upon hand and foot from a motley team of robots. These include Monique (Claude Perron), a robotic lifelike android named Monique (Claude Perron), Einstein (a homemade know-it-all) and some aging companionship models for children and household members. Nestor is a voiceless disembodied being that operates all aspects of the house’s systems, including the air conditioning and doors.

Alice is entertaining a horny suitor and his teenage son when she receives a string of unexpected visits: her adopted daughter (a refugee from the now-sunken Netherlands), her ex-husband and his ambitious fiancée, a garrulous neighbor and her “sports trainer” robot. It’s a scene set for comedy when domestic robots lock the rowdy band inside the house. They claim that the danger outside is too great. From snatches of TV, we gather that the Yonyx (all played by François Levantal), a new and sinister generation of androids that have started to replace humans in most functions, including humiliating people on game shows, have ground society to a halt and are trying to take over once and for all.

Image courtesy of Netflix

It is not uncommon for confusion to reign, even when it isn’t intended. Jeunet and Guillaume Laurant wrote the screenplay. They get carried away discussing the bentwood robot furniture design, paradoxes and the media landscape. Targeted ads hover outside of their homes and disrupt conversations about relevant buying opportunities. He loses sight, however, of the larger picture.

The Yonyx are the antagonists, but it’s the domestic robots, led by Einstein, that engineer the lockdown. They say they’re protecting the humans from the Yonyx, and what they really want is to earn their trust, to be considered humans themselves. Their motives are not clear. The line between the robots that want to be loved and the robots that want to take over is neither clearly drawn nor completely erased, and it’s easy to lose track of who’s pulling the strings, which blunts the satire and breaks the engine of the plot.

As the lockdown drags on and the temperature rises — literally, because the AI has turned off the air conditioner — the humans bicker and snipe, indulging in petty lusts and jealousies. Each scheme that they devise to get out of the lockdown is blocked by technology’s abject dependence. They’re hardly a sympathetic bunch. Jeunet manipulates the cast into overacting in a way that is more appropriate for a physical comedy. Delicatessen. In what amounts to a broad, high-concept sitcom, it’s grating. Even worse, the film flows almost like a sitcom. It has slow fades between scenes and pausing for inaudible laughter.

Image courtesy of Netflix

Bigbug However, there are some pleasures. Some come from the performers: Levantal gives the relentless Yonyx a magnificently creepy grin, while Isabelle Nanty, as the neighbor Françoise, grounds every scene she’s in with an insouciant shrug, standing firm against a tide of silliness. Jeunet is a master at turning a chaotic mix of subplots into an engaging climax. His visual flights of fancy are less suited to the digital realm than the practical FX of his ’90s work was: Bigbug has a colorful plasticity that isn’t fully convincing, and a busy clash of ideas and styles that comes from a lack of restrictions. Still, the film’s faintly ridiculous future abounds with delightful, quizzical little details.

It’s a good thing Bigbug’s action is contained to a single house. An unrestrained director might not have had the vision to be as meticulous as this. Even as it is, Jeunet doesn’t entirely manage to land the laughs or bring his themes or characters into focus. There’s more than a hint of pandemic madness to the whole thing — the characters trapped in a house, slaves to their machines — but Jeunet seems to succumb to it more than comment on it. Bigbug’s garish and confusing world does linger in the mind after the credits roll, primarily because we’re only permitted to see a tiny slice of it. Looking out from the bottle, all that is visible seems distorted and more lifelike than it actually is. However, there are some things that can be distinctly identified.

BigbugNetflix streaming available now