A Review of Cuties (2020)

 

"Cuties poster." Wikipedia,Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 21 Aug. 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cuties_poster.jpg. Accessed 13 Sept. 2020.

 

I had originally intended to pair this review with some additional “thoughts,” but the first part alone is already very long. I’ll go ahead and make the thoughts their own post at some point in the future and link them here later.

This review assumes you’re at least somewhat familiar with the current discourse surrounding this French-language film, written and directed by Maïmouna Doucouré, which has been embroiled in controversy since its official announcement, in large part due to Netflix’s crappy marketing and original plot synopsis for it.

The TLDR Version (For Casual Readers / No Spoilers)

            No, it’s not pornography. The camerawork most often treats the girls’ bodies extremely neutrally, and any scene that is shot in a way that might correspond to the way “sexy” things are shot in other movies comes with either an implicit (rarer) or explicit (almost always) criticism built in. Said moments of potential objectification are also not representative of the movie as a whole, which is otherwise a straightforward dramatic tale about a girl caught between a conservative Muslim upbringing and what at first looks like true freedom. It’s a coming of age story about a young adolescent and, as such, deals heavily with a fascination with the world of adults, including sexual behavior, though the visual language of the movie hardly ever treats the girls like adults without also bundling in a way of undercutting it.

An Additional Tirade (Actual Review Below)

            First, I want to say that it’s unfortunate so much of the discourse around this movie is going to end up revolving around the controversy surrounding its depiction of its main characters—girls who are, at least within the fiction of the movie, eleven. I blame Netflix’s promotion of the film for a lot of this, as while there would almost certainly have been some criticism levelled at the movie for its sexualization of minors, the streaming platform played into this (assumed) controversy for cheap, tawdry marketing. I blame them for taking a moving, funny, and at times uncomfortable (in a good way) coming of age story about girls and turning it into fodder for the deranged QAnon crowd. They’ve shamelessly thrown fuel on the fire of a dangerous climate of paranoia and misinformation in service of drawing attention to a product which is actually a work of art that deserves better. The fact that the marketing hacks at Netflix have gotten to dictate so much of the conversation about Cuties (probably forever) does an incredible disservice to everyone who worked on and starred in the film.

The Review (Full Plot Spoilers)

            With that opening tirade out of the way, I’m going to do something I don’t usually do, which is actually review Cuties. I tend to focus more on analysis and offering some scattered thoughts about the subjects I cover here, but it feels important to actually focus (at least for now) and review the film with an eye toward the controversy given that misconceptions about the film have spread pretty widely. Having watched the movie myself, I can safely say that, no, it is not pornography. It is most often a serious story about a girl from a conservative background who finds herself drawn to the seeming liberation offered by a dance group of other young girls. In pushing back against her background, she ultimately goes too far and risks alienating both her family and the girls she desperately wants to be friends with. The movie is quite open with its condemnation of the protagonist Amy’s actions as well.

            Just to be clear, art does not need to include a literal “What have we learned here today?” segment to be “good.” Movies, books, plays, video games, and so forth do not need explicit morals. I think “show don’t tell” is also over-emphasized as the right way to tell a story, but no artist is obligated to include warnings about not attempting at home the things they depict.

            Cuties, however, does offer clear criticism of Amy’s behavior at several points. The girls of the dance group tell her she’s gone too far when circumstances I won’t get into for the sake of brevity push her to spitefully publish a picture of her vagina on a social media platform (which I feel obligated to point out that we do not see in any capacity), and the girls’ final performance features plenty of shots of the crowd, which juxtapose smiling or interested faces with looks of shock or concern. And this is aside from the things Amy does that can be assumed to be wrong based on simple logic, including stealing from her mother, pocketing someone else’s cell phone, and pushing another girl into the water from around a corner.

            As for the specific accusations of the film being pornographic, the cinematography tells all. Anyone who has ever watched a movie like The Fast and the Furious knows what sort of camera moves and shots movies use when they want to create “sex appeal.” Cuties largely avoids that sort of framing. Often, the girls are filmed somewhat flatly even, which feels to me like a concession to the fact that they knew in the process of filming that the focus of the movie was going to be controversial and wanted to avoid giving bad faith critics ammunition. There are moments where the girls are filmed in a more conventional/potentially gaze-y way while dancing, but those bits are the exception rather than the rule. For the sake of thoroughness and to help refute claims that this movie is just wank bait for pedophiles, I’m going to go over basically all of them in brief below to highlight both how few there ultimately are as well as how the movie itself works to criticize the sexualization of the girls in these moments.

            The following are all the moments in the movie when I felt that the camera “shifted” from a more neutral, disinterested perspective to something much closer to, say, the average music video featuring women dancing:

            There’s one scene that is played for laughs where the dance group comically try and fail to learn to twerk, where the visual style draws attention to just how awkward and inept the girls are at imitating grown women. At one point, Amy performs for some security guards at a laser tag joint the girls have entered without paying, and while one guard appears somewhat interested, the other quickly ushers the girls out and more or less calls the other a creep. Another sequence has them performing on a staircase, and this is the one that passes by with the least criticism, visual or otherwise, from the film itself, likely because this is kind of the high point for Amy and her friends. They’re on top of the world from winning their way into a dance competition, so the movie allows them this moment of feeling like the women they’re emulating. It’s a high but a false one that will soon be taken from them. Later, Amy is forced to undergo a sort of cleansing ceremony where her mother and “auntie” throw water at her, and she ends up kind of dancing/twerking here, but it’s a very surreal, strange moment thanks to the haunting music, ominously circling camera, and the way that Amy’s dance is at first indistinguishable from something like a seizure. The final such sequence is the last dance I mentioned earlier, which comes along with the audience.

            So, to sum up here: Anyone accusing the film of being pornographic either hasn’t seen it or is willfully misrepresenting the spirit of the whole movie—outside of some very specific moments that, removed entirely from the context of the rest of the story, could be seen as gross and nothing more. They do not represent the tone of much of the movie, however, which is otherwise a very tonally traditional coming of age story about a person torn between two worlds. The flat, disinterested way in which the girls are most often shot, even in their slinkier attire, calls attention to the awkwardness of it all. And that’s the point—These are young adolescents who are, like all adolescents, fascinated with sex and adult behavior but who are still unprepared for anything of the sort and comically or even grotesquely fail when they try to cross into that territory with their outfits and behavior. The Cuties are contrasted sharply with the “normal” attire of the other students at school; they’re clearly outliers and out of their depth rather than being unequivocally positive figures that the film wants to glamorize.

            In some ways the movie goes out of its way to be didactic: One of its earliest scenes is a group prayer meeting for the women of Amy’s building where they are told to be virtuous and that there will be more women in hell than men for the sin of immodesty. In the end, Amy finds happiness occupying a space in the middle of the two worlds she’s been pulled between. There’s always been a manic, dangerous energy to the Cuties dance group that contrasts the narrow, constricting or controlling corridors of the home associated with Amy’s family and culture, but the film does not end with an endorsement of the former and a condemnation of the latter. This isn’t my culture, so I can’t really say anything definitively here; however, to this outsider looking in, Cuties doesn’t dismiss Amy’s entire upbringing the way that I thought it would. She doesn’t abandon it for some decadent European ideal of youthful freedom. In the end, she leaves both the scanty outfit of the Cuties and the conservative dress sent to her by her father behind and steps out in a simple top and jeans. She doesn’t celebrate her father’s marriage to his second wife, but she doesn’t run off into the neighborhood like she had been doing either. She simply goes outside and jumps rope with other girls from the building—nearby but still dissenting on some level. Her character’s conclusion can be read as a mediation between two extremes. And given Amy’s age in the film, the clear implication is that this is the beginning rather than the end of this internal conflict.

            My biggest criticism of the movie, then, is that the Cuties plot thread doesn’t get a lot of resolution, at least for the other girls of the group. I don’t think the film sees them as villains (even if they are extremely chaotic), and while it can probably be assumed they lost the dance contest when one of their members had an epiphany on-stage and raced off, we don’t get any sort of closure with them either. This is a pity especially in the case of the nucleus of the group, Angelica, since we’d previously been given some promising glimpses into her own life and dreams, and ending the story without even checking in with her feels kind of… mean. A very close second that’s somewhat in the same vein is the way that the group’s one “fat” member, Yasmine, is also the one selected to cause a fight that gets her kicked out and sidelined for essentially the entire rest of the movie. This is in addition to, of course, the expected cracks about her weight at points.

            While the film is a drama, it also has some incredibly funny moments as well. At one point, for example, the girls are approached by a group of older boys who ask them about their ages. When Amy spills the beans (that they’re elven and not even fourteen), the guys take off, and one of the girls (Coumba) calls after them about how she knows her multiplication tables and to please come back. A preteen trying to prove her maturity by insisting that she knows about Pythagoras is just wild. I will also say that I loved the antics of Amy’s younger brother, Ismael, who truly seems to be living his best life here.

            I don’t do scores, but Cuties is a movie I ultimately enjoyed. As someone who experiences a lot of second-hand embarrassment in general, I felt for Amy a lot as she awkwardly tried to break out of her shell without ever really telling her friends exactly why she was so desperate to be with them. Parts of this film did make me uncomfortable because of the sexual imagery, but as I’ve already demonstrated, those moments are intentionally critiqued internally and are meant to be upsetting. As far as figures with some clout over here, like Ted Cruz, calling for an investigation into the film as child pornography goes, there simply isn’t any smoking gun to find. It’s boundary pushing only at specific points and seems very well aware of the thin line it’s walking to the point that it essentially stylistically separates those scenes from everything else in the film. It’s probably worth watching if you like these sorts of stories and don’t feel too weirded out by the sexualization, regardless of the internal critique.

            I went into this movie thinking there might be enough questionable content that it could actually get banned from distribution in the US given the current cultural climate, but I don’t think that’s the case now. I also thought there might end up being a major divide in praise versus condemnation along critical and popular lines, with the “average” viewer who isn’t as attuned to reading and interpreting visual language hating the movie and anyone with an interest in visual rhetoric seeing it for what it is; however, I think Cuties is extremely upfront and obvious with its messaging and visual signposting. There are still going to be people who may watch it who don’t see that—maybe because of an actual inability to read the language or because of willful disagreement with the movie’s subject matter period, but I don’t feel that barrier to entry/understanding is all that high if you go in willing to understand.

            It’s also hard to ignore the fact that this particular film is getting all this vitriol when it happens to tell a story about an immigrant experience, young girls, and the developing identity (sexual or otherwise) of those girls. These are all things that society traditionally does not seem to care for, and while there’s always the counterargument that “Well, this movie is just too sexual,” I think it (and the reaction to it) still needs to be placed in that larger context. There’s a pattern to this sort of disdain and fearmongering along ethnic, religious, and gendered lines. Ultimately, Cuties is a fine movie. It’s well-made and thoughtful and deserved better than being burned in effigy because Netflix wanted to court controversy more than it wanted to spotlight the work of a woman of color based on its actual artistic merits.