Thank goodness for the French, and their weird sense of humor. Big Bug is directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Jeunet gave us the little miracle of a film, Amelie, about a strange French girl, with specific interests and a bizarre upbringing, that somehow spun into a beautiful emotional journey. Big Bug lacks Amelie’s emotional depth, but when you subtract emotion from Amelie, you just get something hella strange. And you know what? Sometimes strange is just interesting.
The Big Bugs happen sometime in suburban France in the future. Recently divorced homeowner Alice (Elsa Zylberstein) with an adopted daughter Nina (Marysol Fertard) invites over a love interest, Max (Stéphane De Groodt) and his son Leo (Hélie Thonnat), for a family meet cute around old cultural artifacts like books and early Mac computers. But in classic sitcom mode, Alice’s ex Victor (Youssef Hajdi) and his secretary lover Jennifer (Claire Chust) drop by before their exotic vacation, and nosy neighbor Francoise (Isabelle Nanty) comes searching for her multiply cloned dog.
Making the future worse, there’s these group of superhuman android creatures called Yonyx (François Levantal plays their leader) running for political office on a very harsh AI supremacy platform. This political campaign is causing all sorts of societal friction, endangering the humans inside this house. This forces the robots inside Alice’s house like housekeeper Monique (Claude Perron), a Wall_E looking mech, an 80s looking enlarged child’s action figure, and robot house manager Einstein (voiced by André Dussollier) to lock these people inside…for their protection.
With 15ish characters trapped in a gigantic house, Jeunet’s movie has endless pairings and stories to tell, mostly good, but all over the place. And as fitting many French comedies, Jeunet mostly goes for broad sitcommy humor that’s funny in any language, and drives home character motivations quickly. Most of the human actors here really go for it with their emotional states, overacting the hell out of how they’re feeling. That works best when those emotions are in service of some sort of cultural critique, like when Alice’s swooning over Max is overlayed by Monique’s analysis of the real feelings underneath the interaction. That’s clearly Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s point – humans are emotionally driven creatures – which leads to most of the machines being the most interesting characters in the movie as they try to learn how to assimilate. Watching Monique, Einstein, and the other AI’s try to learn what it means to be human to connect with their homo sapien counterparts is straight up shooting fish in a barrel. I could have watched an hour of the robots trying to learn how to tell the perfect joke.
Big Bug’s world building shines brightest. The setting is well constructed, looking like a futuristic version of Edward Scissorhands’s idyllic suburban neighborhood: colorful, bright, and creepily inhuman. The house itself is a treasure trove, a living history museum that helps discreetly fill in the details of the world we’re in. Jeunet’s brilliant, loopy mind concocts a host of fascinating AI creations, which simultaneously provide a host of interesting characters and give us a human to AI evoluationary history of Big Bug’s timeline. All of these movie specifics are filtered through French cultural experiences, which is where Jeunet’s storytelling is most potent, over and above the obvious AI reliance = growing human incompetence. Everytime a human feels exasperated over something, some ever watching AI Amazon comes by suggesting a new product to buy to help put their feelings at ease, which makes them even more frustrated. Jeunet totally belives any law and policy will have some sort of flaw in its rollout because of the imperfect nature of the people enacting those policies. Watching the Yonyx literal rule enforcement to the chagrin and exasperation of the trapped humans is a critique of how inhuman some government policies can become despite their best intentions, because of all the “big bugs”, and how those in power can manipulate the helpless into humiliating themselves to prevent from getting into deeper trouble.
I hear a lot of my friends complain about a sameness malaise over stories today: MCU, true crime, antihero stories, reality TV. Well, Big Bug at least is most certainly not that. If you need to satiate the weirdness inside of you, throw Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s little weirdo movie on Netflix, and let that freak flag fly. I see you, insect robot Albert Einstein!