I watched, and hated, the movie Cuties so you don’t have to.
Cuties (Mignonnes), a movie written and directed by Maïmouna Doucouré as her feature directorial debut. The story surrounds Amy, an 11-year-old French-Senegalese girl that is going through some troubling times during her young, adolescent years. She is faced with many trials and tribulations as a young girl growing up between two worlds; the western one that is more modern and freer than the traditional one with her strict Muslim family’s ideals.
On paper, or looking at this movie objectively, we could surmise that this film is just another coming of age film surrounding a young girl. But there is much more to the movie that we’ve seen glimpses of on social media, about Netflix and how they promoted this film to be about young girls infatuated with ‘twerking’. There has been immense outcry from the public towards Netflix regarding this movie, the director, and the exploitation of very young girls. In fact, there is so much outcry, many are calling to boycott the streaming platform and potentially seek jail-time for those involved.
As a survivor of sexual assault at a very young age, and into my teen years, this movie had me reeling with contempt and disgust. Throughout the entire movie I sat in shock with what I was seeing. To me, it was worse than what many were saying about it. I had to skip over all the dancing parts for my sanity alone, as the gut-wrenching feeling made me want to vomit my zucchini fritters. If you are a survivor, please take caution if you want to watch this movie. Though there is no sexual assault of a minor, no rape or anything of the sort, I put this trigger warning solely for purpose of alerting those that may not want to see children being abused. I wanted to go through each and every point I wrote down, that came to just under 1400 words, about everything I found wrong with this film, but that would take too long to write, and I hardly doubt people would care to read it.
The movie starts off innocent enough with Amy coloring an adorable portrait of her family in her new home. We see that Amy’s family is disadvantaged, living in a housing complex, all the while her father is out of the picture at this point. We see Amy, and her mother, take part of a religious ceremony. This struck a nerve with me as their commentary shows the deep seeded misogyny in religion. We hear things like “Women must be pious”, “Where does evil dwell, in the bodies of uncovered women”, and “We must obey our husbands”. This only adds fuel to the proverbial fire that reduces women to a subservient role. Women are not seen, women are not heard, women are not meant to have a voice and must remain chaste for their future husband. This is the crux that is being a woman in a religious institution.
The scene changes with Amy meeting Angelica, a young girl that is dancing wildly in the laundry room of the complex, and then begins to iron her hair. I do not know about her circumstances, but I have to say, ironing your hair is a bad move! The next day we see Amy go to school for the first time at their new city. Something that stands out to not only Amy, but to the viewer, is the scantily clad very young girls at school. They are wearing crop tops, very tight skirts and they begin to do a mannequin ‘challenge’ at school. What alarms me the most about this scene is the clothing, but also how one of the girls is treated by her principal(maybe?) and is dragged off in such a rough manner. To think that a phone is more cause for alarm rather than the mini-skirt an 11 year old is wearing baffles me.
We learn later that Amy’s father has taken another wife; this undoubtedly upsets her mother who is forced to act happy when calling people to ask them to come to the wedding. We hear the sorrowful tears being shed by her mother, the ‘auntie’ figure telling the mother it’s her duty to act proper and call people, to be happy, then the slaps her mother inflicts upon herself, and then the joyful sounding voice as she talks to more people over the phone about the wedding. To me this is a major cry for help, one where the woman is yet again subjugated to a life she is not in control of.
All throughout the movie we see Amy being forced into this role as a second mother, one who is not only helping her own mother, but is being forced into this role by her family that wants Amy to be obedient and submissive. She takes care of her siblings, goes to the market to shop and feeds her young brother and the while she’s doing the ‘female’ role of being a maid. This whole narrative is why Amy is rebelling against the traditional roles her family is forcing on her, and why she is swinging so far to the other side of the moral compass. She is not in control, and not being taught the middle ground as the two worlds surrounding her are essentially suffocating her. We see the gift from her father, a gorgeous blue dress, shift and change, and then eventually bleed from a flower when Amy herself begins to menstruate; the metaphor being the two side of Amy – the glitzy need to dance, and the traditional side of her family.
The dancing in this movie shows the sexualization of minors, and how social media plays a major role in how young people see themselves at a time when they are figuring out who they are. Sexualization of women, and young girls specifically, is a major problem in every single industry around the world. We see ads for young girls in scantly clad clothing, in ‘baby thongs’, in horrid sexualized poses for photos. We seemingly have been desensitized to this deplorable phenomenon that has stripped young girls and women of a safe way to grow into their own. But with the #MeToo movement, people are taking back control. This movie sends the wrong message about what it means to be a woman, how a woman should own her own sexuality, and how we should be treated. With that said, one may argue that this movie is attempting to tackle this issue, however, it is in fact not tackling this issue as the description led us to believe. Rather, the director did not tackle the sexualization of minors, but left it up to the audience to tackle on their own, all the while we are forced to see girls as young as 11 gyrating on screen under the guise that this is some revolutionary piece of art that makes a viewer think about how society exploits young girls.
There is one point in the movie where everything shifts completely, and crosses into the realm of what people are speaking out about – Amy taking a photo of her genitals and positing it online. Thankfully, we do not see anything, but the act of Amy doing it makes me want to wash my eyes out with bleach, much like the soap they pour into another girl’s mouth to ‘clean’ her. If that scene is not enough to disgust you, the scene that led to her doing it was Amy throwing herself at a much older man, who’s phone she stole, and attempting to undress herself to sway him to let her keep the phone. It makes me question what sort of role models this girl has, and how she could have been so misguided by them.
There is more dancing, more drama, and finally we get to the end act of the girls dancing on stage. But in order for Amy to have get there, she shoved another girl from the group into a river, who very nearly drown just so she could retake her place in the group. The movie finally ends with Amy’s mother standing up for her in front of the ‘Auntie’, and we see Amy walking out in what typical clothes girls would wear, going to jump rope and have fun…as a child.
Boy oh boy, what a whirlwind of emotions I felt watching this movie. I had to take a break after watching it, drink some coffee and calm my anxiety. So, let me boil this down to my own personal feelings on this matter. I left out quite a lot about the movie, some maybe needed to be seen or I just did not want to write about it because I found it either too offensive, or not worth writing about.
As I’ve mentioned prior, I am a survivor of sexual assault. This movie was triggering for me and brought up deeply buried feelings I did not want to relive. To sum it up in even the simplest terms, this movie broke my heart and disgusted me. The director should be utterly ashamed for creating this work. Netflix should be ashamed for even green lighting it. The parents of these young girls should be ashamed for allowing their budding minds to be part of something so vile.
A movie that one may argue is comparable would be the movie Kids(1995) that stared some now pretty big names like Rosario Dawson, Chloe Sevigny, Leo Fitzpatrick. The movie, at the time, was not received well. It was a story where we followed Telly(Leo) out and about as a young sex-crazed and drugged up teen. That movie too did not tackle anything, but rather, it was purported to show what ‘normal’ teens were like in urban areas. The main difference I find between the two of these films is that Kids does not hide behind the guise of some societal situation we need to tackle. It makes no claims on trying to make the viewer think about how society treats young women, or young men. Cuties, however, hides strongly behind the message about sexualization and exploitation of young girls and how we need to tackle them.
The director has said in an interview that Cuties is “a story of a young girl trying to find herself between two worlds”. She goes on to say that” … girls see that the more a woman is overly sexualized on social media, the more she’s successful”. Through that may be true, and we can see it on social media every day, the message gets lost in the movie’s vehemently disgusting exploitation of 11-year olds. Perhaps it is a culture clash, our two very different Western worlds, one in the USA and that in France, where we deal with exploitation in a different manner or what is morally repugnant.
Doucouré goes on to ask us, the viewer, if the objectification itself is some form of oppression. Yes, it is, however and again, this message is not asked in the movie. It is an afterthought, it has no relevance to Amy’s story and it does not engage the viewer. This movie is pure shock-value, much like any horror movie, but the villains in this movie are little girls being sexually exploited by a director that has trouble getting her point across through film making.
What could the director have done to convey her message to the viewer without resorting to exploiting young girls? Make the movie a true coming of age film. Show Amy tackling those troubling times that every young person faces, and how she is vying for independence from her overbearing and controlling family. Show Amy exploring makeup, selfies….not the gross kind, going out with her friends. But please do not show them twerking, do not show them gyrating, do not show them with their legs spread for the camera in tight shorts, and crop tops. The director has done the very thing she was set out to destroy, sexual exploitation of young girls.
I don’t know about you, but I am tired. I am tired of young children used, like these girls were, by adults. I am tired of children being exploited on the streets, being abused, being assaulted, and scarred for life by the actions of adults. All the while directors like Maïmouna Doucouré are being praised for their supposed ‘cutting edge’ film work as if it is a marvel and will be one for the history books…. well, perhaps for all the wrong reasons in this situation.
My advice do not watch this film. I wish I could take back the 1 ½ hours of watching and skipping through the dance parts of this film. The message is entirely lost, and this film is nothing more than slimy garbage that needs to be tossed in the bin.
https://www.savethechildren.org