BIGBUG
My biggest cinematic disappointment of 2022 was none other than Jean-Pierre Jeunet's “BigBug”. The film originally featured on my most anticipated list of 2021, however it did not end up seeing a release until February the following year. As I have said numerous times, I have a very special place in my heart for Jeunet, thanks to his 1995 masterpiece “The City of Lost Children”, a film I adored so much that I named my first daughter after it's lead character, Miette. From this moment on, Jeunet has had essentially a “free pass” with me, in that I always look forward to what ever he does next, all in the hope that he comes close to matching his 1995 film. He has come close multiple times, but if I am being honest, the shine of Jeunet is starting to fade a little, and he hasn't made a truly fantastic film for close to twenty years, since 2004's “A Very Long Engagement”. In fairness to Jean-Pierre Jeunet, he has only made three films since then (he is a director who does not make a large number of films and takes a lot of time between projects), but sadly “BigBug” is easily the worst of them; the worst of his career in fact.
When “BigBug” first made my most anticipated list, I had seen no footage or stills from the film. It was only Jeunet's name and involvement that made me look forward to it so, but as soon as I saw the first trailer for it, my heart just sank. It looked absolutely terrible. One thing you can count on in a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film is that it will be filled with spectacular visuals, but I hated the look of “BigBug” with a passion. It has an overly glossy, plastic look to it, that made it feel more like an animated film than the live-action film it is. The design of the robots are idiotic and ugly, and the humans are styled in such a strange, cartoony way that just did not work at all. The story takes place in the future where robots essentially do everything for humans, and so the overly clean look is very deliberate but it creates a film with no texture, nothing feels tangible. The entire world feels false. Compare that to the world of “The City of Lost Children”, and it is like chalk and cheese; that world feels lived in and despite being fantastical, there is a weight to it all that gives it a reality.
The crux of the story is that due to a misunderstanding, the suburban household robots lock their human owners inside their houses, with the good intention of keeping everyone safe from a possible A.I uprising. An unusual group of oddball characters find themselves trapped together, and hilarity ensues.......except it doesn't. The comedy on display is so immature and extremely unfunny, whilst the majority of the characters (both human and robots) are incredibly annoying to be around. When Jeunet attempts some poignancy, he treads out the well worn cliché of what it actually means to be human. It is an incredibly disappointing film, but I have to laugh, because my memory of it appears to be more negative than my actual opinion of it after I watched it, as I noticed that I gave “BigBug” 2.5 stars, but in my mind today, it is much, much lower, so much so that I expected it on my top ten worst list. I guess I must have liked something about it, however I cannot remember what.
In a recent print interview with Jean-Pierre Jeunet, he was lamenting the fact at how hard it is now to find financing for his films and the hoops he is expected to jump through to acquire such financing. He states “I am the director of “Amelie”, surely that is all you need to know” (I'm paraphrasing here), but he needs to understand that that classic film is now 22 years old, and he hasn't come close to matching it since. The days of him making whatever he wants are over, and personally I would love him to make a smaller, darker, more character driven film, rather than the high-concept films he has been making lately. He was interviewed on the Criterion blu ray of “Hotel du Nord” recently, talking about his love of director Marcel Carne and the poetic realism films from France of the 1930's. I would absolutely love if he made a film in this style, dripping in both romanticism and nihilism. Maybe I am just overly hopeful, but I am sure that Jeunet could make it work today and should, because what he just produced with “BigBug” is a waste of his talent and is the reason why it was my biggest disappointment of 2022.
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