If you've ever worked as a writer or translator for the film industry, maybe focusing on subtitles and synopses, you may know that sometimes these texts are dramatically reduced for time limits. It isn't rare for example to find plot summaries that, reduced and edited to the minimum to fit a DVD package or a box on a website, don't make the film any justice. This may have been the case with the recent debate around Maimouna Doucouré's French-language feature debut "Mignonnes" (Cuties).
A sort of revised and extended version of Doucouré's 2016 Sundance and 2017 César-winning short "Maman(s)", "Cuties" was presented at the World Cinema Dramatic Competition section of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival in January. Doucouré won the Directing Award at Sundance and the film was released in France in August 2020 and last week it came out on Netflix.
The Netflix advertising campaign for this film was accompanied by a poster with four young girls identically dressed in aquamarine metallic crop tops and hot pants; a synopsis (then deleted) explained that the movie revolved around Amy, the main character, who "becomes fascinated with a twerking dance crew" and, as she tried to join them, she started to "explore her femininity, defying her family’s traditions."
The picture and summary were enough to unleash chaos on social media with some people, who obviously hadn't watched the film, asking Netflix to remove it. Yet "Cuties" is definitely not about a twerking gang and it is not your average film about a dance competition (yes, we have seen too many of them).
The film follows indeed the vicissitudes of a Senegalese Muslim immigrant girl, eleven-year-old Amy (Fathia Youssouf Abdillah), who lives with her mother and brothers. They are settling down in the marginalized suburbs of modern-day Paris and Amy usually goes to pray with her mum and the other women in their building while she eagerly waits for her father to arrive from Senegal.
But soon things change: Amy sees the suffering of her mother when she discovers that her polygamous father is preparing to return from Senegal with a second wife (Doucouré drew upon her experiences as a young girl). Longing to escape this life, Amy starts drifting towards a gang of girls, the Cuties - Angelica (Médina El Aidi-Azouni), Coumba (Esther Gohourou), Jess (Ilanah Cami-Goursolas) and Yasmine (Myriam Hamma) - hanging around at her school who seem obsessed with a local dance competition. First enrolled to film the girls with her (stolen) mobile phone, Amy is promoted to dancer and comes up with allusively sexualised movements and gestures, a choreography inspired by videos she has found on the Internet.
As this coming-of-age story progresses we understand that Amy, who gravitates in a liminal world, will have to find her place, bargaining and negotiating between the worlds she crosses. She will eventually find her own path, but the latter may take her far away from her traditions and even further away from her gang of free-spirited girls, ready to turn their backs on each other when things go terribly wrong. Amy will indeed be rejected by her friends when she posts a compromising photo of herself, something that should make us all think about the pressures to which kids are exposed everyday, but should also reveal us the pain and confusion of growing up in a modern world ruled by social media.
Doucouré plays with different contrasts: there is one main dichotomy in the film, the one between traditional values and heritage, juxtaposed to our modern times and to what's important in this world (likes and followers...). Yet there are further juxtapositions between the girls who long to look older and more mature than what they are (and they prove they are mature enough to understand complex feelings - it is heartbreaking how Angelica, the daughter of Latin American immigrants, already knows she is a failure in her parents' eyes) and the fact that they are still children, as proved by the scene in which Coumba mistakes a condom for a balloon, and the girls wash her mouth with soap.
Clothes have an important transformative power in the film: Amy tries hard to fit in, ironing her hair (with disastrous results) as she saw Angelica doing in the laundry room, and wearing her younger brother's T-Shirt that fits her like a crop top; one day she wears leggings with a top in school and looks like a model on a runway, but her underwear, exposed during a fight in the playground, betrays her age and her family's financial constraints.
There's a moment of elation with the girls going on a shopping spree to buy lingerie and costumes, garments that contrast with the dress Amy's father sends from Senegal - long, elegant and formal and aimed at making her look good at his wedding.
Clothes also help Amy becoming invisible: during a prayer service she hides under her veil, pretending to be praying but actually watching videos of scantily-clad women twerking, and while she may not be able to understand what she sees, she imitates them because she knows that's the path to being accepted.
Amy is perennially suspended between these worlds, between her new friends in leggings, mini-skirts and colourful dance costumes, and a bride covered by a veil that looks scary in Amy's eyes as this mysterious woman looks like a ghost or a projection of what she may become in a few years' time if she doesn't find herself first.
There are intriguing moments in the film in which the architectures surrounding the characters play a key role: the building where Angelica and Amy lives, for example, may be full of people, but it suffocates the two girls, here Amy who has misbheaved is subjected to a ritual to exorcise her demons and clean her soul. The school is also a dangerous place where bullying occurs, so the only safe place is the surrounding derelict area where the girls go to rehearse their dabroutines and where they can be free.
So what's all the fuss about "Cuties"? The film was premiered in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition section of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, but there was only a massive debate after Netflix released it, with the hastag #CancelNetflix trending on Twitter in the United States. A day after its release Texas House of Representatives member Matt Schaefer announced on Twitter he had Texas Attorney General Paxton's office to investigate the film for "possible violations of child exploitation and child pornography laws".
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz called on the Justice Department to investigate Netflix and the "Cuties" filmmakers to determine whether they broke any federal laws against the production and distribution of child pornography. "The film routinely fetishizes and sexualizes these pre-adolescent girls as they perform dances simulating sexual conduct in revealing clothing, including at least one scene with partial child nudity," Cruz wrote in a letter to Attorney General William Barr Friday.
Yet "Cuties" glamorises children's sexualisation as much as Danny Boyle's "Trainspotting" glamorises heroin. "Cuties" actually exposes the hyper-sexualised culture in which kids live in today and that delicate progression from childhood to puberty complete with the first period and unexpected menstrual blood (something that probably deeply unsettled some conservative grown-ups out there). So if you expect this to be your ordinary dance movie about a dance competition in which the most unlikely team wins after working hard, or about young girls happily bursting into a song and a dance like Disney's princesses, well, you're going to get very disappointed.
It is easy to shake your head and feel horrified by these girls dancing in the finale of the film, but it is not "Cuties" that contains dangerous and scandalous content. After all the Internet and TV are full of programmes - from dance competitions to beauty pageants - in which girls dance with the same routines seen in this film and they aren't usually as criticised as this film was. So you wonder if those ones who outrageously accused "Cuties" of sexualising children aren't maybe just vapidly and petulantly embodying the proverbial rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass or if they are angry about a clever coming of age film directed by a strong woman and featuring a cast of bright young girls. After all, rather than being enraged about a film, shouldn't those ones who condemn "Cuties" be more worried about the conduct of a misogynist man like US President Donald Trump, accused by several women of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment?
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