The petition currently has more than 647,000 signatures. A petition was then started on calling on Netflix customers to cancel their subscriptions as a way to boycott Cuties and other content on the streaming service "that exploits children and creates a disturbing vibe". 1 trending topic on Twitter in the US and quickly gained traction in other countries. Yet when Cutieswas added to Netflix in September the critical praise was quickly overshadowed by a chorus of voices calling for its removal. The movie, which was written and directed by French-Senegalese filmmaker Maïmouna Doucouré in her feature film debut, premiered in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition section of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival where Doucouré won the Directing Award and received general praise from critics. And when a security guard tries ejecting them from a laser-tag hall they’ve sneaked into, they shout: “Stop groping me, you child molester!” At some level, they have a precocious sense of what’s at stake, but they are as naive as children – the children they actually are – about what’s happening.When Netflix added the award-winning film Cuties to its line-up, the move should have been a slam dunk for the streaming service. When a harassed teacher tells them to stop dressing inappropriately, the Cuties defiantly raise a cry for “Freedom!” as they are dragged off.
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Weirdly, the film seems to predict and pre-empt all the language of debate. In a way, it’s a classic Mean Girls storyline, provocatively backdated to the tween years. At first, they pick on Amy, but she makes friends with them, steals a smartphone so she too can participate in the endless Instagram narcissism festival and then insinuates herself into the Cuties’ dance troupe by inventing even more outrageous moves for them. At religious meetings, Amy and all the other women are told they must obey their husbands, a dogma fiercely enforced by a community elder, known as “auntie”, or La tante, in which role Doucouré has got out of retirement the veteran Senegalese actor Mbissine Thérèse Diop (who was the star in Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl in 1966).Īnd so, quietly desperate at her oppression, Amy becomes fascinated by an outrageous girl-gang in her year at school (the “Cuties”) who don’t give a damn about anything and are bumping and grinding through a dance routine they’re working on for a local competition. She has witnessed the wretched humiliation of her mother, because Amy’s father just got engaged to a second woman back in Senegal and wants to bring this woman over to France to live in their small flat. It is about a lonely 11-year-old French girl of Senegalese origin: Amy (Fathia Youssouf) who has learned that to be female is to be a second-class citizen. There has been an ugly and abusive social media storm, dominated by vicious trolls who haven’t seen the film and by mischief-makers jumping at the chance to embarrass those with Netflix connections such as the Obamas. This is because of sequences showing a group of naive, excitable 11-year-old girls in a dance group twerking and pouting their way through a grotesquely sexualised adult routine. Mignonnes, or Cuties – an interesting, flawed debut feature for Netflix from Franco-Senegalese director Maïmouna Doucouré – finds itself at the centre of the nastiest obscenity row since David Cronenberg’s Crash in 1996. S hould this film be cancelled? Or, to raise a secondary point: should one see this film before taking a view on such things? It’s still surprising to me, even having lived through so many controversies like this, how many people can’t quite bring themselves to answer “yes” to the second question, or they say that watching the film simply plays into the filth-merchants’ hands, a sorrowing paradox I remember first encountering during the National Theatre run of The Romans in Britain.