Cancel Netflix - Cuties
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Anonymous
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The trailer above does not reflect the disturbing aspects of the movie.
It’s either been scrubbed due to the controversy or it never contained them. Check out this video for a breakdown of the disturbing scenes/aspects: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=exCNHEGnZ5M There’s one scene where 11 year olds do basically a strip tease to Avoid punishment from two old men security guards....the 11 year olds grind the floor in a way that looks like sex. The filmography has lots of lingering shots on the 11 year olds Crotches. |
Anonymous
So I pulled the trigger and watched the damn dance sequences on netflix, not some weirdo re-cut reddit site or whatever. The film makers were hammering home a point, that this is NOT appropriate and yet that they are given all the imagery on social media that its what is ideal. TBH I do think she pushed it too far. It was meant to make the audience really uncomfortable, so you could feel like those people sitting in the audience at the dance show. What I wonder though, is if they had shot it wide lens of the whole stage, without the close ups- which made me cringe something fierce, if we as the audience would have felt that recoiling and horrified feeling. It doesn't matter if you are conservative or not- images we see all over start to desensitize us. Would we see it for how bad it really was vs. what we see as dance performances on tv or socials all the time which normalizes much of these movements for adult women. I don't know, I would hope so, but I can't say for sure, it truly built to a level of deep discomfort for me as they kept zooming in. I know that was the point, I just wish they were able to find a better way to cut it so that people's knee jerk to it didn't get in the way of what was otherwise a really important story to be told about what culture(s) tell girls basically as soon as they leave elementary school. It very very much reminds me of the movie 13, as far as an attempt to show the "shock value of today's girls". But 13 didn't have this super layered component of sexualizing girls from an extremely conservative standpoint of culture vs. pop culture hypersexualization of a women's worth. That element of this movie is the part that is most thought provoking obviously, but its getting obfuscated by the fact that they WAY over did the shock value of the girls sexual dancing. Actually in a way, its strange because other movies about the shocking "real lives" of young teens and tweens have actually shown these young actors in physical situations with men or boys and this one is focused solely on girls' using their own bodies. I wish they had gone about it without trying to hit people over the head with it, because then it becomes white noise in fodder for outrage, etc. The point is we should be collectively embarrassed by the mirror it holds up. Also, God is a myth. I wish you the best. |
Anonymous
| ^Sorry, not gonna read all that from anyone depraved enough to sit through crotch shots of 11 year olds twerking and flashing their breasts. I hope you get some therapy! God bless! ❤️ |
Anonymous
| Making a movie about not sexualizing children while sexualizing children. |
Anonymous
Well..to be fair, it's the same thing as "Don't think about a pink elephant." It's impossible to achieve it as a movie without displaying it. |
Anonymous
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The Front Row
“Cuties,” the Extraordinary Netflix Début That Became the Target of a Right-Wing Campaign By Richard Brody The subject of “Cuties” isn’t twerking; it’s children who are deprived of the education and the emotional support to put sexualized media and pop culture into perspective.Photograph courtesy Netflix On Wednesday, Netflix releases “Cuties” (“Mignonnes”), the remarkable first feature from the French filmmaker Maïmouna Doucouré. Unfortunately, the platform’s misleading advertising has given rise to a scurrilous campaign against the film itself. The promotional image, showing young girls in bikini-like clothing dancing in provocative ways, matched with an inaccurate description, has been taken to suggest that the film celebrates children’s sexualized behavior. In fact, the subject of the film is exactly the opposite: it dramatizes the difficulties of growing up female in a sexualized and commercialized media culture. I doubt that the scandal-mongers (who include some well-known figures of the far right) have actually seen “Cuties,” but some elements of the film that weren’t presented in the advertising would surely prove irritating to them: it’s the story of a girl’s outrage at, and defiance of, a patriarchal order. The girl is Amy Diop (Fathia Youssouf), an eleven-year-old of Senegalese descent, who lives in France with her observant Muslim family. At the film’s beginning, she moves with her mother, Mariam (Maïmouna Gueye), and her two younger brothers into a new apartment in a Parisian housing project. The apartment has a secret: a room, kept locked, that Amy is ordered to avoid. Amy (short for Aminata, and pronounced with a short “a,” like the French word ami) is a dutiful child, kept in line lovingly but sternly by Mariam and by “Auntie,” her great-aunt (Mbissine Thérèse Diop), who’s steeped in traditions that she passes along to her niece. Amy, who’s quiet and shy, is also socially isolated—she has no cell phone, knows no one at school, and isn’t inclined to express herself or introduce herself. As for her father, he’s away, visiting the family’s homeland. Much is being made of the festive plans for his return—but Amy learns, accidentally, that the point of his trip is to take a second wife, and that he’ll soon be returning to Paris with her. The sealed room in the family’s apartment will be the new wife’s bridal chamber. Amy takes this news as a betrayal of her mother—especially after she discovers that Mariam, who is made miserable by the news, is being coerced, by Auntie and by the entire social structure of their community, into celebrating her husband’s polygamy and welcoming the new bride into her home. At an all-female prayer meeting that Amy and Mariam attend in the building’s common room, the preacher, a woman, decrees, “We must remain modest. We must obey our husbands.” Auntie tells Amy, “Do everything you can to please your mother.” Now that order of modesty strikes Amy as part of a system that subjugates women, and pleasing her mother means deferring to that system. Instantly, Amy enters a state of revolt, which is all the more emotionally wrenching for her lack of a vocabulary to discuss her feelings and her lack of friends to discuss them with. She associates modesty with misogyny and obedience with oppression, and so she acts out, overthrowing both in a series of increasingly reckless actions. Soon after moving in, Amy sees a neighbor and classmate, Angelica (Médina El Aidi-Azouni), doing a hip-hop dance while doing laundry in the building’s basement. Soon thereafter, Amy sees Angelica similarly dancing with three other girls near an abandoned train yard. At first, they insult her and throw rocks at her. When she approaches them at school, they tell her that they’re preparing for a dance competition (the group’s name is the Cuties, les Mignonnes). Amy knows that the girls are trouble—she sees them defying teachers and getting disciplined in the schoolyard and running wild in a supermarket—but she resolves to join them. She soon finds that their dancing is inseparable from their sexual curiosity and brazen provocations, which are matched by their ignorance about sex. Angelica, in particular, is a gleeful troublemaker, at times seeming nearly sociopathic, as when she steals her older brother’s work shirt, slams another girl’s computer to the floor, and assaults another member of the group. As a sort of virtual hazing at school, the Cuties push Amy into the boys’ bathroom to video-record a boy’s genitals. Her membership in the group involves her self-aware misconduct, transgressions that she undertakes quickly and coldly: stealing a cell phone from a cousin, stealing money from her mother, fighting with another girl, making herself an object of social-media scandal, even several acts of potentially grave violence. For Amy, belonging to the Cuties means more than a new activity or a new set of friends—it means forging for herself a new, self-chosen identity, which she clings to desperately, at great risk and great cost. Before becoming a filmmaker, Doucouré was in the sciences (she has a degree in biology), and there’s something admirably analytical about her cinematic methods. Though “Cuties” is a sharply dramatic film that sticks closely to Amy throughout and observes her actions in detail, Doucouré brings background ideas to the foreground, inviting sociological and abstract considerations alongside the sharp delineation of character. She shows Amy undergoing the many tribulations of maturing—and, in each of these anecdotally depicted events, extracts from them an element of cultural context. (For instance, when Amy gets her period, Auntie says that, at Amy’s age, she was engaged and was married a few years later—a fortune that she wishes on Amy, too.) The subject of “Cuties” isn’t twerking; it’s children, especially poor and nonwhite children, who are deprived of the resources—the education, the emotional support, the open family discussion—to put sexualized media and pop culture into perspective. Left on their own—Angelica, for instance, is virtually unsupervised by parents who are working very hard to keep their restaurant afloat—they’re unable to find or even to seek the line between liberation and exploitation, between independence and imitation. “Cuties” is about the absence of knowledge and absence of reasonable discourse about sex and sexuality, power and desire, that help young people to avow and confront these drives constructively—or, at least, not too destructively. Lacking those things, Amy latches on to a mode of revolt that is itself a trope of a misogynistic order. “Cuties” is a film of the center, and it’s aesthetically of the center—it depicts the unconsidered without advancing to the realm of the subjective, and it doesn’t allow its young protagonists much discourse, outer or inner. It’s not a movie of introspection and self-consideration; it’s more a story of the rule than of the exception, of what’s unduly extraordinary about the effort to live an ordinary life. As such, it’s a story of French society at large—its exclusions and the exertions demanded to overcome them. Though many of Amy’s actions are dubious, her spirit of revolt is nonetheless sublime and heroic. “Cuties” dramatizes what people of color and immigrants endure as a result of isolation and ghettoization, of not being represented culturally and politically—and of not being represented in French national mythology. Its underlying subject is the connection of personal identity to public identity—and the urgency of transforming the very notion of French identity, of changing the idea of who’s considered the representative face of France. That idea is brought to the fore in an extraordinary, brief, symbolic ending; it’s enough to give a right-winger a conniption. |
Anonymous
Right. Makes perfect sense. Kind of like raping a woman to prove you're not a misogynist. |
Anonymous
The actors were ages 11-13 at the time of filming. |
Anonymous
| I really feel like the people up in arms about this are just so incredibly hypocritical. If you aren't also out there protesting every single child beauty pageant in this country, many many dance recitals across this country for girls under 12, then you're hypocrites. This film portrays that stuff and challenges the audience to ask if its gross, clearly the answer is yes. And yet you excoriate the film that is intentionally trying to bring that to light, instead of all the institutions that go on every single day that keep ACTUALLY sexualizing our children. |
Anonymous
How do you feel about Dance Moms? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRpm9KFUAM8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MmBj66_PCg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMYbyprvY6c |
Anonymous
I’m not at all bothered by the clips you posted above. I think the dance scenes from Cuties are disgusting and Cp. In the clips above I saw no: crotch grabbing, floor grinding, butt slaps, crotch close ups, butt zoom ins, or sexual grinding on each other. |
Anonymous
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If the Point was to make some kind of point about sexualizing young girls being wrong, why not use older actors who appear younger?
The main actors in the film were ages 11-13 at the time of filming. |
Anonymous
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I will say the hyper sexual dances were gross but that is the culture we are feeding to our kids. This is more about how that affects girls. A critique of porn, not an attempt to make it. LOL. You must have missed the zoom ins on the girls bottoms and crotches and chests. All while gyrating sexually. It's disgusting. This is not a critique in any way, shape or form- and you know that. Clearly you haven't been to any dance competitions lately. There is an entire American culture built on those dance routines. |
Anonymous
Oh thanks so much! Would you be able to help direct me to the part of the Clío Above where I could locate the children gyrating with each other and grabbing their crotches while wearing skin tight, camel-toe showing shorts? I’ll wait. Thanks so much!! |
Anonymous
| I'm beginning to think the strenuous objectors in this post are actual dance moms uncomfortable with a movie that asks them so pointedly about what they are having their girls run around in. |