You may have heard about Cuties, a coming of age French film directed by Maïmouna Doucouré and the lucky winner of multiple petitions over 500K signatures strong calling for its removal from Netflix. A lot of people, critics, even politicians across the aisle are talking about this movie. It's been called soft-core child porn by some and praised by others for portraying a cautionary tale against the sexualization of young girls in a time when women are feeling more sexually liberated.
Image source: Netflix
Cuties (Mignonnes in French) is one of the only major films to be written and directed by a Senegalese-French woman about a young Black girl. It stars Fathia Youssouf as Amy, an 11-year-old Senegalese-Muslim growing up in Paris with her mother Mariam (played by Maïmouna Gueye) and brother Ismaël (Demba Diaw). The controversy kicked-off after Netflix picked up the title post-Sundance. Many people noticed the hyper-sexualized Cuties cover art on Netflix - young girls, tight clothing, provocative poses - and how it was different than the movie's Sundance poster - young girls, regular clothes, hanging out. Netflix was quick to apologize and change the art, but the sparks had caught hold of the internet's attention and led to numerous petitions calling both the artwork and the movie an endorsement for sexualizing young girls. After reading many of the complaints, it's clear that most are coming to their opinions without actually watching the film. This frustrating version of 'person who reads article title acts like they understand the whole article' is taken to the peak as #CancelNetflix starts to trend, death threats to the director are sent, and QAanon gets involved.
And we should all question anything that has even a whiff of QAanon involvement.
So, let's get into my interpretation of the film and why I appreciated it. And I hate that we can't assume things like this to be true anymore, but yes, I watched the movie in its entirety with my wonderful and talented friend, Ozi Boms, before coming to these conclusions.
I use quotes from various criticisms to highlight the double standards at play and the complexity of making art that seeks to depict, not endorse.
"The one on the left looks like 'a teen drama comedy coming-of-age story...that comments on the hyper-sexualization of preadolescent girls'. The second is just 'the hyper-sexualization of preadolescent girls.' Period." - @miggsboson
Okay so this one is fair. To understand why it might have happened, we have to know that Netflix is trying to solve the problem of capturing viewers' attention in 90 seconds or less with a massive library of content organized like books in a shelf. In this short period, people are likely browsing dozens of titles and using the cover art to decide if a trailer is even worth watching. Instead of showing the same art to everyone, Netflix realized that artwork optimization, a process of testing multiple pieces of art that capture diverse images of the show or movie, can solve this problem. To put their explore/exploit tactics simply, they throw a bunch of art into the system, show different viewers different images, learn which ones work best (drives the highest watches) for each type of viewer, and ditch the low performing ones. After years of doing this, they've learned a few things (like bold, intriguing, controversial images work for the most part) and made a few mistakes (like misrepresenting that a show centers people of color who actually have small parts). The Cuties debacle is arguably their biggest one till date. Whether it was intentionally chosen to drive click-bait or accidentally missed due to a lack of human intervention in the input phase, only the folks at Netflix will know. The director and writer, Doucouré, has noted that she did not see the creative before the American audience did.
Side note - I can probably spend hours talking about artwork optimization (it was the first spark that drew me to working in streaming tech) but I will spare the details unless you're interested and slide into my inbox.
Okay now there are spoilers ahead.
"The only motivation of those who would produce such a film as ‘Cuties’ is to sexualize children and to fuel the appetites of those who would feed on the sexualization of children" - Parents Television Council
To write off Cuties as a movie that promotes child sexualization is to unfortunately miss its point. From the beginning, we see our main character Amy processing a lot of things at once - she lives with her mom and brother in a small public housing community in Paris with other immigrants. Surrounded by older, more traditional Senegalese women who seem to always speak through her, rather than with her, she's frequently tasked with the responsibility of being the adult and caring for her little brother. Perhaps the most pivotal scene necessary for understanding a substantial amount of this movie happens when the audience, along with Amy, finds out that her father will be taking a second wife. Amy listens quietly as her mother breaks down hearing the news, but puts on a brave show of congrats, as is customary in their culture. These few scenes add depth to Amy's feeling of loneliness and wanting to be liked, moving us beyond the simplistic definition that this is a movie only about the sexualization of girls and into the uncharted territory of dense and complex emotions that we fail, as a society, to attribute to young girls.
Cuties is also about the fleetingly tangles of friendship at that age. They're jumping on the bed and eating gummy bears one minute and slapping each other the next. Amy struggles to make friends at her new school till she sees Angelica, a bold little girl who lives in the building and happens to be a really good dancer. To befriend Angelica, Amy realizes she'll need to be accepted by the other girls in Angelica's group the 'Cuties', who also enjoy dancing. To Angelica, dancing is her way of showing her parents that she's talented and worthy. As Amy tries to get into the group after initially being bullied by them, we start to see the build-up of how she learns to mimic what she sees around her and in the media. It's small things at first - folding her shirt into a crop top and adding face altering filters to selfies - to bigger things - learning floor work that looks straight out of a Parris Goebel video and shoving one of the dancers into the water to take her place in the competition. Jarring to watch, there's a calculated domino effect right until Amy crosses a line by posting a photo of her private parts online that even her newly found friends can't excuse. We see the immediate fallout. All the social acceptance goes away, Amy's mother and grandmother put her through a ritual meant to cleanse her of any demonic spirits, and her friends no longer want to be seen with her. As Amy keeps moving towards the extreme, we're made to understand that she's on a downward spiral till her final moment of clarity. In the middle of the group's dance performance, she hears her mom's voice singing and runs home in self-awareness of all that she's done.
Through the movie, we see how Amy and her mom are pressured to take on roles of dutiful wife and daughter. In some African Muslim countries like Senegal, it is normal for men to be polygamous, regardless how their wives and family feel. Amy and her family are expected to not just be supportive of this wedding, but attend it and even cook for it. The brilliance of this story is in its complex depiction of hyper-sexualization without flattening it out to an easy PBS message. I get the desire to want a clear PSA, especially since violence against young girls and rape-trafficking is rampant. Let me be clear, there can be no grey area around that. But it's not just bad people who are the problem. It's all of us. It's well meaning adults, like Amy's aunt, whose response to seeing Amy's first period, is to tell her about being covered in a white garment and married off to an older man soon after. Like the scene where Amy's dress for her father's wedding is uncomfortably pressed onto her body, Amy feels a specific and limiting definition of womanhood pressed onto her. The adults in the movie who select child dancers for the competition, the adults who call the girls whores after seeing them dance, the people in the crowd who seem to be cheering when the girls dance, the others who cover their eyes, are all a reflection of a society that doesn't know how to respect/protect women and girls without looking away or controlling them.
"the issue with Cuties is purely a matter of piss-poor execution. Constantly zooming the camera in on little girls’ genitals is an amateur and heavy-handed way to denote child exploitation. Period." - The Grio
I struggle with this. Yes, there were scenes that made me feel uncomfortable and made me want to fast forward - dance sequences where the camera focused on the girls' legs, crotches, hips. It is fair to wonder if these scenes, in the way they were shot, needed to be there. But Cuties isn't a music video where we see images and song with very little context. The visuals, direct and unforgiving as they may be, are couched around character and a story line that highlights their problematic choices. By the way, it's nothing we don't see and excuse in other movies and real life, notably ones that center American whiteness and boys.
Feel the Beat (Netflix)
Let's take for example Good Boys, the raunchy R-rated comedy that's considered to the Superbad of middle-school boys. These kids play with sex toys on screen, look at porn on the internet, and ogle at older girls. Critics highlighted how this movie and Seth Rogan, the producer, successfully showed innocence in its "celebration of modern ascendant manhood." This movie too made a point about kids growing up too soon, and I wonder how much of its wide audience acceptance (6.2/10 on iMDb vs Cuties 2.4/10) had to do with Seth Rogan's fame and the centering of boys.
It's not just movies. I only need to hum the chorus for three seconds before someone recognizes 'Stacy's Mom', a famous song about a boy wanting to get with his friend’s mom that we belt shamelessly at bars, weddings, and birthday parties. I do it, I know you do too. Stacy's mom being the object of a teenage boy's fantasy doesn't make us as uncomfortable because we give boys a pass on literally everything. Cheerleading camps, pageant training, reality shows about competitive girls and their dance moms all start the exploitation of girls for audience entertainment at a young age. Even the most liberal amongst us thoughtlessly share videos where young Black girls get brutalized by police and be policed at significantly higher rates than peers. Yet the same people who are leading the movement to have the Department of Justice look into whether the producers and creators of Cuties violated any federal laws, are silent about Breonna Taylor's killers.
I trust that Doucouré knows what she's doing, especially after reading this interview where she describes her intentions behind the film. It’s clear that there's a major difference in the why behind her choices compared to the unnecessary shock factor that shows like Game of Thrones rely on. I appreciate the way she shows young girls be messy - they scream, they bleed through their pants after that first period, and they hilariously take hand soap and Scotch-Brite to the tongue for scrubbing clean after an unhygienic incident. I appreciate how one of Amy’s traditional dresses stalks her thoughts and represents the costume of womanhood that is forced on her. I mostly appreciate the way Doucouré chooses to show violence against the girls. As Amy walks up to the teacher in class, a boy slaps her butt and calls her a slut who is asking for it. Where another director might have chosen to focus on extracting audience pity from the shame Amy feels and play into her being his victim, Amy quickly turns around and jams a pencil through the boy's hand. Amy, of course, gets in big trouble and this quickly takes the focus to how society reacts to rape culture. Part of me loved thinking about how that boy might never put his hands anywhere without consent again.
My final thoughts
There are plenty more criticisms and praises for Cuties, but I'd like to leave you by calling attention to the ending scenes, my favorite of any recent movie for being both comforting and depressing. After rushing off the dance competition stage, Amy runs home, screaming for her mother. Her aunt first sees her, calls her out for wearing whore clothes and begins to bring the world down. Amy's mother, who till this point has scolded, screamed, and called a pastor to check if the devil is within her daughter, defends Amy. Mariam embraces her daughter, recognizing that Amy is likely going through pain and confusion, and tells her that she doesn't need to attend her father's wedding. In this moment, her mother removes the pressure Amy feels to fit into a dutiful daughter's role and gives her the space to process and just be. While Amy watches, Mariam adjusts her hat, takes a breath, and leaves for the wedding, unable to give herself that same space. It's a brave, unfortunate, and selfless depiction of motherhood.
And from Ozi Boms:
“I don’t have much to add that Madhu has not already effortlessly said, but I do want to challenge people to really look at this film. Look at the controversies, the posters and, if you are up to it, watch it. It’s not an easy watch. It, like true cinema, demands your attention and empathy, and I do think it’s a reflection of our society that empathizing with Black women in media has become such a difficult task (so much so that we write this movie off when white men like Martin Scorsese can get away with showing extensive debauchery AND Hollywood supports actual child predators like Woody Allen and Roman Polanski). And even if after all of this, you come away with the same viewpoint in that depiction is endorsement, at least you had context. At least you were exposed to similar or completely different experiences of what it is like to grow up as a Senegalese woman. I myself flip back and forth as to the necessity of the film’s more sexual scenes, but as someone who grew up in a similar culture and has seen such pressures, the extremity of it all works in this movie. I can never understand what it is like to be a young girl, but I can at least give my ear, time and energy to understanding Doucouré’s story and its unveiling of the dark corners of a society. I truly believe that this film will age well, fossilizing our current culture like amber and daring us to do better."
Thanks to Ozi for his edits and thoughts. He's an incredible film-maker, you need to check him out here.