Les Mignonnes/Cuties - a review

The original poster and Netflix's version

There's a storm currently well past brewing in a corner of Twitter about a French film called "Les Mignonnes" ("Cuties" in English), directed by French-Senegalese Maïmouna Doucouré. 

The shitstorm started when Netflix announced last month that it was going to show the film and accompanied that announcement with its own poster, showing the young girls at the centre of the film in tight-fitting, revealing outfits and suggestive poses. 

Without having even seen the film, and solely going by that image, people started to denounce cultural condescension, exploitation and gratuitous sexualisation. The film is a paedophile's wet dream, capable of perverting the young (though the film has certificate 15), we are told. 

Almost 400,000 people have signed a petition demanding Netlflix remove the film from its listings, and that the whole website be "cancelled". The story has crossed over to the press. People are cancelling their memberships and Netflix has removed its poster and amended the description of the film on its site. 

However, having now watched the film, I can't see how any of the criticisms levelled at it can stand. 

The plot, based on testimonies of such girls gathered by the director, focuses on a group of 11 year old girls of mixed ethnicities who dream to take part in a local dance competition. 

The main protagonist, Amy, is of Senegalese origin and finds herself torn between two cultures. One familiar and imbued with traditions and religion, that she feels alienated from, another saturated with the discourse and images of sexuality, that she doesn't understand despite being attracted by it. 

She is new to the area, facing puberty and pretty much left to her own devises by her mother, who finds herself having to deal with the unwanted but inescapable fact that her husband (still in Senegal) is finally on his way to her to celebrate his marriage to a second wife. 

There are indeed some skimpy clothes and some highly sexualise dance moves in the films, particularly in the climactic scene of the dance competition, that Netflix took its poster from. But the film does not in any way glamourise such things and is clearly a social commentary on what society is doing to those girls. In fact that scene in the poster is purposefully, deeply cringe-worthy, and under the booing of the audience, a catalyst for Amy's epiphany. 

Left to themselves, they are trying to make sense of the world they live in, while finding a sense of belonging. Bombarded by sexualised images in video clips, with no viable alternative (the culture at home is too oppressive to be it), they have to choice but to conform to and ape what they see as the norm and its language (visual or aural). 

In the end this fails because they don't really understand what that language really means and because they are simply too young. The core message of the film is that they are made to grow too fast by an adult world that has no real place for them. 

The film does attack cultural islam but it's not like it is showing Western culture as being better in anyway. In fact Doucouré is equally critical of both cultures finding a common ground in their objectification and commodification of women, even if it is in different ways. The traditional culture is not capable, is not ready, to provide answers to Amy, but neither is our western culture. Both are letting her down. 

"Les Mignonnes" is a good piece of cinematography that gives a voice to a minority within the minority. The girls in it are just that: girls. Often they are ugly little brats too, but they are in a quest for meaning and Amy, at least, eventually finds some. 

The film has won a number of prizes and if people had not jumped to conclusions following Netflix's frankly ham-fisted marketing, it would be easy for them to see why.

- Netflix’s Cuties is too intelligent and moving to be marred by one bad-taste poster, Clémence Michallon, The Independent