The lockdown is a three-ring circus, starring tech overlords and trapped, obsequious humans.
Just when you thought society couldn’t get more absurd or the human condition further oppressed by cute dictators and angry senile puppets, here comes Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Big Bug, the first amazing movie of 2022 — a film that grasps the madness.
Set in 2045, way later than when scientists predicted the flying or driverless car, technology has already made life easier and worse. Recently divorced Alice (Elsa Zylberstein) tries to restart her love life with a new date, courtly but randy Max (Stéphane DeGroodt), in her hi-tech suburban home. Alice and her teenage son (Hélie Thonnat) enjoy all the modern digital conveniences — including domestic robots Monique (Claude Perron) and Einstein (voiced by André Dussolier) that provide them with futuristic leisure much like what we saw in The Jetsons.
But Jeunet turns the cartoonish future into sci-fi comic terror. 2045 society has ceded control to artificial intelligence so that Alice and her visitors are threatened by a revolt of errant androids.
Life is upended by a bug — the forgotten term that once described both computer and biological viruses before humans took their subjugation for granted. That observation makes Jeunet’s film a satire and a cautionary fable. Big Bug outstrips the smug cynicism of Spike Jonze’s artificial-intelligence romance Her by recognizing the horror of technological advancement, the mistakes of scientific progress.
In the opening scene of a freaky reality show titled “Homo Ridiculus,” enjoyed by gamers and VR (virtual reality) enthusiasts, Jeunet teases us about technology backfiring. This edgy overture shows humans enslaved by robots. The precedent it pushes (where the everyday looks otherworldly, the slight exaggeration of people being treated like circus animals) comes home to roost in a narrative as scary-hilarious as Neveldine-Taylor’s Crank movies.
Alice and friends become “Homo Ridiculus,” dominated by the show’s malevolent host android, Yonyx (François Levental), whose steely blue-eyed, machine-tooled smile is as persistently cheery as it is threatening — the TV-game-show-host visage of our vengeful overlords. Yonyx contests the domestic robots who, in Jeunet and co-writer Guillaume Laurant’s ingenious twist, envy the easily categorized thoughts and emotions of their owners and so long to be human.
Here’s where Jeunet’s cautionary tale links up with Spielberg and Kubrick’s A.I., while reflecting how the millennium’s sophistication has degenerated, turned to folly. Big Bug’s satire has clear political parallels but goes deeper than topical complaints about vaccines and the economy. It pinpoints the emotional life that humans sacrifice. (Alice’s son is asked, “If your whole life is virtual, how are you going to kiss a girl?”) This is a bell-jar comedy about mankind trapped in its own hubris. No wonder Alice and company’s isolation in lockdown evokes Luis Buñuel’s great existential fable The Exterminating Angel, in which bourgeois elites found themselves unable to leave a party. Big Bug isn’t merely about class, it’s about right now.
American filmmakers are too entrenched in the dictates of Covid to meaningfully satirize political theater. French fabulist Jeunet can see that “the new normal” is bizarre, so he makes it fantastic, fearsome, and farcical. The humans endeavor to outwit their captors — referred to as “Mecha,” as in A.I. The Mechas and the Organics (humans) differ in both intellectual and emotional awareness: One mocks its similarity to the other. Middle-aged Françoise (Isabelle Nanty) is dismayed when her sex-toy robot, Greg (Alban Lenoir), a plasticene lover like Jude Law’s Gigolo Joe, gets zapped. But you will be amazed when Greg reverts to his basic sing-song training — a nightmare as poignant as Hal 9000’s regression.
Big Bug deserved a wide theatrical release, but Netflix is streaming it because our frightened film culture wouldn’t dare give it a theatrical release. But there’s a surprise benefit to this quasi-censorship: Dubbing the French dialogue into English is so slightly disorienting that the panicky voices seem inside your head. A far cry from the nihilistic WALL-E, the point of this satire is to recognize how these futuristic characters have traded their liberty and their souls. In a madcap facial-recognition sequence, humans humiliate themselves before Yonyx — obediently distorting and contorting themselves for approval. No outright political filmmaker could be so convincing about our current frustration. Big Bug’s spiritual speculation resembles the prophetic warning of that German Expressionist classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
Jeunet’s gift for combining the poetic and the fantastic is as striking as it was in his 3-D masterpiece The Young and Prodigious T. S. Spivet and Alien: Resurrection, the most voluptuous film of that series. Here, Jeunet’s bright colors and prankish manipulation of space makes a suburban home and its lookalike environs an appropriate carnival atmosphere. Big Bug turns a spiritual and political pandemic into a three-dimensional funhouse mirror.
