If you haven’t watched Cuties yet, chances are you’ve heard about the controversy surrounding it. While its initial release at the Sundance Film Festival in January garnered positive reviews from critics — as well as the directing award — its controversial pre-release promotion on Netflix months later had advocates demanding its immediate cancellation. The promotional image in question depicted four young, scantily clad girls lowered in twerking poses paired with a poorly constructed summary that suggested the main character, Amy, joins a twerking crew in order to explore her femininity.
Despite the backlash and online petitions, Netflix has not removed the film from its repertoire, instead changing the promotional image and updating the description to better reflect the director’s intended story. In reality, Cuties is a provocative commentary about the over-sexualization and exploitation of young girls. It tells the story of Amy, an 11-year-old Senegalese immigrant living in one of the most impoverished Parisian neighbourhoods, who looks for belonging while slowly separating from her conversative, religious family’s values. Her descent into self-exploitation mirrors the struggle of many modern girls who are discovering their sexuality and self-worth through social media. The debut director and scriptwriter, Maïmouna Doucouré, based the film on personal experiences from her pre-pubescent years, as well as her observation of current social trends amongst youth.
Cuties is messy with its delivery, but earnest in its message. The director poured a year and a half of research into development of her story, hired an on-set child psychiatrist, and approached the film with the best of intentions. However, gratuitous shots of the girls’ butts and chests could have been removed while still imparting Doucouré’s condemnation of child exploitation. This begs the question of whether Doucouré fell into the trap of exploitation in her own quest to highlight the dangers of it. In an industry where trauma and exploitation are glorified for the masses (and often written by non-victims), it seems unfair to tell survivors that their stories don’t belong because of their graphic content, but in Doucouré’s situation, her call for action against hypersexualization of young girls is muddied by her own participation.
Netflix, who streams the film internationally, is notorious for its selection of television shows that exploit the bodies and experiences of teenagers; they often skirt around the controversy by hiring mid-20 actors to fill their roles for series such as Riverdale, Sex Education, and Insatiable. Despite the graphic sexual content in these shows, no widespread controversy over exploitation has been raised. (Insatiable’s controversy centred around its fatphobic plotline, not its sexualization of teenagers.)
Though Cuties doesn’t deserve a pass for its faulty depiction of how traumatizing exploitation can be, it flawlessly highlights the confusion and mixed signals associated with adolescence. The dance troupe’s awareness of sex is so limited that one girl doesn’t recognize a used condom and blows it up into a balloon. The other girls immediately start shrieking that she’ll be contaminated with AIDs or cancer while the girl tearfully explains, “I didn’t know what it was.” This scene touches on the reality that while sexual content might be rampantly available online, actual sexual education is limited, if not non-existent in the online spaces where children are exposed to it.
The film also ensures that the viewer is always aware that these are not young adults or even teenagers. They are children navigating a world where sex is marketed to them as one of the only means to feel good, to be seen as a valuable entity. They are still young girls clinging to their childhood by having pillow fights, competing to see who can eat the most gummy bears, and picking out their favourite lip gloss.
Cuties might have stumbled its way into the limelight, but the discussion it generated at least coincides with the director’s intended commentary: we have a problem with child exploitation — online, at home, and in our media.
