Sex robots take France by storm on Netflix

If you’ve ever wondered what Parisian robots will look like in the year 2050, Jean-Pierre Jeunet has your answer.

Sexy!

The French director of “Amélie,” who’s been splashing vividly realized, subversive worlds onscreen for three decades, returns to feature films with “Big Bug,” an artificial-intelligence mystery sex farce satire on Netflix. There must be a French term that encapsulates all of that. Je ne sais quoi, perhaps.

About a group of wacky francophones trapped together in a sleek home by their talking tech and trying to figure out a way to escape, it’s the delirious European ensemble movie you should watch this weekend instead of that awful “Death on the Nile.”

The strangeness of Jeunet that film buffs once had to seek out at arthouse cinemas feels right at home on the streaming platform. Viewers have been devouring warped foreign takes on social ills and technology lately, like the Korean mega-hit series “Squid Game.” Here’s another.

While “Big Bug” is characteristically eccentric, it also has the most mainstream appeal of any Jeunet film since “Amélie.”

The crazy characters are Alice (Elsa Zylberstein), a single mother, and her bored son Léo (Helie Thonnat); her ex-husband Victor (Youssef Hajdi) and his whiny young girlfriend Jennifer (Claire Chust); older neighbor Françoise (Isabelle Nanty), who is in love with her sex robot Greg (Alban Lenoir); a director (Stéphane De Groodt) who is trying to get in bed with Alice, and his politically active daughter Nina (Marysole Fertard). 

Their robots, led by the Stepford-wife-like Monique (Claude Perron), lock them inside to “protect” them from an incoming attack by the all-controlling Yonyx bots — they look like the Borg of “Star Trek” and act like the Terminator.

As the captives devise their exodus, personalities — and occasionally bodies — clash. All the while, the androids sweetly attempt to become more human.

There are some clever futuristic touches, such as a device that makes a room smell however you want (lawn trimmings! wet dog!) or a human-looking android whose mouth amusingly functions as a dust vacuum. Françoise’s shtick with Greg is a hoot until it becomes haunting, when we realize that our demented society probably is moving in the direction of loving relationships with sex robots.

“Big Bug” doesn’t have the epic swoosh of some of Jeunet’s previous films. He was, after all, being positioned by Hollywood to helm huge tentpoles for a while (his “Alien: Resurrection” flopped in 1997). “Big Bug” is smaller in scale than his “The City of Lost Children” or “A Very Long Engagement,” but grand on personality. 

He adores peculiar-looking actors, like the extraordinarily intense Gill, and Nanty, whom fans will remember from “Amélie.” The home they all inhabit, bathed in piercing green and orange, is like “The Brady Bunch” house doused in nuclear sludge.

Once outside the dwelling — we don’t venture there much — the cityscape CGI can look rather cheap (being rough around the edges is becoming a Netflix movie trademark), and I would like to have seen what Jeunet would’ve done with a bigger budget and larger sound stages.

Ah, well. “Big Bug” is still big fun.