Story: Amy, an 11-year-old girl, joins a group of dancers named "the cuties" at school, and rapidly grows aware of her burgeoning femininity - upsetting her mother and her values in the process.
I don't normally go to movies like Cuties because I usually find them boring. I'm not the target audience I guess. But I'm a sucker for controversy and when that initial poster Netflix dropped I just knew this would get scandalous. Then I saw the trailer and it looked like a fairly decent (if common) drama. I still didn't care for this after that but controversy kept ongoing. Even had friends on Facebook creating petitions to cancel this. So of course I had to watch Mignonnes AKA Cuties.
We live in an age where most people just have the opinions they see on social media. It's very rare for someone to have their own opinion about something. As I'm pretty sure most people failed to watch even a trailer for this. But we were quick to judge and want to burn the director at the stake. We live in the #cancelculture so it's fairly common for anything we don't like, we burn. Now, I know Hollywood is a predator who eats children for breakfast. That's a story we've known since the Golden Era. I know the elite is trying to normalize pedophilia. That's a no brainer.
But I find the case of Cuties very curious because after watching the movie I realize that this movie was just a case of terrible, misguided, and diabolical advertisement by Netflix. Netflix who for some reason thought it would be a good idea to release a poster of underaged girls in skimpy clothes showing off their butts and then gave a terrible plot description that sounded like a pedo's wet-dream.
Now as for the movie, is pretty much an average drama that gave me Thirteen vibes (a drama from 2003 starring Evan Rachel Wood). Well-directed by Maïmouna Doucouré and sporting surprisingly good acting by the young girls, especially by new-comer Fathia Youssouf who's performance is so credible and honest. You can tell they were all devoted to the material.
There's something to be said about how children are being sexualized and how for some reason that's become normalized which is fucked up but definitively gets its point across. Also opens up the conversation about how precocious kids are growing these days and how social media is a gateway for that. One thing I found really interesting is the clash of cultures on display. We have our lead coming from a very prude world while the other girls are so violent showing zero modesty. This is as political as movies get. Unlike Disney's Mulan, this one doesn't feel preachy or in your face. If anything sometimes gets too realistic. Now, it's kind of hard getting into a story where all the characters are unlikable and I know most of them are kids. I forgot what assholes most are (Thank Zeus I don't have any).
Cuties is slow-paced but never boring and no doubt made me feel uncomfortable as hell (I think that was the point). Especially during the dance sequences where we get way too many close-ups of the girls in revealing clothing dancing like strippers. For a movie criticizing the way children are sexualized, some moments were glamorized and glorified. I'm not gonna say this is straight-up pedo material because I don't feel or see that the point of this particular director was to make fap material for creeps but she definitively could've found better (less erotic) ways to display the sexualization. But I guess she wanted shock value and boy did she went far.
All in all, this is far from a bad movie. Not my cup of tea but worth a shot if you're in the mood for something maybe a bit different from all the two hours long superhero movies, or Disney's crappy remakes (FUCK YOU MULAN). Cuties is a movie that means well even if ill-advised. Could've used a different approach but I guess too late for that.
Here's the trailer:
This moment pissed me off:
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