'BigBug': the director of 'Amélie' premieres his worst film

2022-02-11T03:17:59.750Z

The unique and initially very authentic French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Jeunet has seen his career sink since 2001

His greatest glory was the beginning of his decline.

That's how shocking—and partly unfair—sometimes things are in art.

The unique and very authentic French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Jeunet has seen how the global triumph of the beautiful

Amélie

in 2001 has subsequently been choking on him because of a double track.

The first, due to the exorbitant number of emulators of her colorful and exultant personality, of her designs, her

voiceover

narrations and her musical pirouettes, which led to the

Amélie style,

in cinema, in advertising and even in the media, it will begin to become more and more ball by reiteration.

Jeunet as a victim of his own originality.

The second, because since then the occasional flashes of brilliance in each of his subsequent films have shown an evident decline, until reaching

BigBug,

his first feature film in nine years, produced by Netflix and released exclusively on the platform: the worst with a lot of difference from his entire career.

More information

The secret of the success of 'Amélie' two decades later: "It talks about positive things, about the pleasures of life"

Long Courtship Sunday

(2004), created three years after

Amélie,

was surely her most ambitious work: World War I, lavish settings, larger-than-life melodrama, vehemence in each of its shots.

However, smug in excess, and with hammering virtuosity as a hallmark, she has been falling into oblivion.

With

Micmacs

(2009) he seemed to return to the world of one of his best works, the meat horror tale

Delicatessen,

the extraordinary debut that elevated him to half the world with his gadgets, his chromatic games and his comic book characters.

But, as in some (too many) of his films, narrative undercuts outweighed bursts of genius, leading once again to the thought that Jeunet always handled himself better at close quarters—his marvelous 1990s set pieces— than in the long ones.

Finally, and despite his irresistible sympathy,

The Extraordinary Journey of TS Spivet

(2013) showed an increasingly inane director, prisoner of his fragmented narrative and narrative and stylistic formulas that no longer surprised anyone, despite the novelty of the three dimensions.

Nine years later, and one year behind the scheduled release date due to the pandemic, his new work finally arrives.

But

BigBug

is a disaster: concept, image and narration.

A film set in the year 2050, which apparently Jeunet had been trying to put together for a long time, and which he had failed to raise due to lack of funding.

Jeunet says that Netflix has given him total freedom, and perhaps that is the main problem: that no one told him that this script was not damn funny, it had become old in many aspects and his illustration was much more tacky than stylish .

BigBug

is a futuristic satire set exclusively in a house, in which two families are locked up due to the rebellion of the robots that until then have made their lives easier.

With a certain touch of

The Exterminating Angel,

he has some promising ideas: the prolonged cloning of pets, to always have the same dog by their side, without fear of death;

that robots lack a sense of humor;

androids as a remedy for loneliness.

However, they never develop as halfway between an idiotic sitcom and the worst episode of

Black Mirror,

the film falls between the extravagance of some of the performances, childish nods to the pandemic worthy of a TikTok video fan and, above all, for its horrendous treatment of the image.