‘CUTIES’ BRINGS OUT UGLY IN CRITICS

Female director rejects claims the film presents an overly sexualised view of young girls, says the story is her own

WHEN she first set out to make Cuties, French-Senegalese film-maker Maïmouna Doucouré said she wanted to shed light on the pressures faced by young girls as they become teenagers.

Her directorial debut, which won an award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and premiered on Netflix this week, follows Amy, an 11-yearold in Paris, as she rebels against her immigrant family and joins a dance crew of other girls at her middle school, at times flashing moves in skimpy outfits.

But after controversial ads for the film showed off some of those dance uniforms, a horde of mostly conservative voices – from Missouri senator Josh Hawley to Fox Nation host Tammy Bruce – have attacked the movie, claiming it promotes an overly sexual view of young girls and even paedophilia.

To those critics, Doucouré offered a simple challenge this week: watch the movie first. “I’m eager to see their reaction when they realise that we’re both on the same side of this fight against young children’s hypersexualisation,” Doucouré, who wrote and directed Cuties, told the online publication Zora.

In a statement to media outlets, Netflix echoed Doucouré’s remarks, saying the film is “a social commentary against the sexualisation of young children”.

Like the film’s 11-year-old protagonist, Doucouré was raised by a family of Senegalese immigrants in Paris and grew up struggling to balance between mainstream French culture and her Muslim parents’ more traditional values of femininity.

“I put my heart into this film because this is my story,” she told Variety, calling the character of Amy her “alter ego” and noting that she, too, “had all of these questions also about how to become a woman”.

The film sees the 11-year-old become obsessed with, and then join, a “free-spirited dance clique” called the Cuties as a way to rebel against her family’s beliefs. While researching and writing the film, Doucouré said she interviewed hundreds of pre-teens about how they understood questions of gender and sexuality. “Our girls see that the more a woman is sexualised on social media, the more she’s successful,” she said in a behind-the-scenes segment. “Yeah, it’s dangerous.”

The film instantly received rave reviews upon its premiere at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, winning Doucouré the world cinema dramatic directing award and drawing seemingly little blowback.

Yet last month, when Netflix released promotional material for Cuties, it looked nothing like the French poster that had been previously used to advertise the film. Instead, the company used a still from a scene in which Amy and the titular Cuties perform in spandex shorts and sparkly crop tops.

An accompanying description of the plot listed on Netflix said the 11-year-old protagonist “becomes fascinated with a twerking dance crew”, according to Vulture, and “starts to explore her femininity, defying her family’s traditions”.

Seemingly overnight, social media in the US exploded with rage. Tens of thousands of people signed a petition against the film, rated “TV-MA” (unsuitable for children under 17) for language, as a mob on Twitter accused the film of encouraging the hyper-sexualisation of young children. Doucouré, who had not seen the poster before its release, received death threats, she told Deadline. A Netflix executive called her to apologise over the ad, and the company issued a mea culpa for “inappropriate artwork” that it said did not fairly reflect the movie, which had otherwise received largely positive reviews. But following the film’s release last Wednesday, the backlash only seemed to grow stronger. | The Washington Post