New Netflix movie "Cuties": a new movie that reveals a side of girls' captive lives to social media - Mignonnes
In the new Netflix movie "Cuties," a scene in which a band of four 11-year-olds, dressed in tight, shiny clothes and wearing bright makeup, dances on a stage in front of a jury.
 |
New Netflix movie "Cuties": a new movie that reveals a side of girls' captive lives to social media - Mignonnes
They move their bodies in a way that they learn from the videos of songs they watch on their cell phone screens, in a way with crude sexual overtones.
The shocking scene causes you to instantly turn your face away from the screen until those shots are gone.
This scene particularly bothered many around the world, including those who did not watch the whole movie. The sexual depiction of young actresses was criticized for fear of making such a violation of girls ’rights in general a matter of course. But it seems that the people's "disgust" of these shots is exactly what the director wanted.
The director and writer of the film, Maymouna Dikouré, who is 35 years old, is French of Senegalese origin, like her hero, Amy, and this is her first film that she says shows part of her life story.
After the big uproar against her following the screening of the film, Décoré wrote in the Washington Post an opinion piece in which she said: "There are people who found some scenes from the film disturbing when watching them. But if they really listened to eleven-year-olds, they would find that girls’ lives are actually really upsetting. "
"Seeing them so heartbreaking."
"Cuties" premiered at the Sundance film festival in January and has garnered critical acclaim.
But before the movie was shown on Netflix and made available to the general public, it was subjected to a major campaign of criticism - the reason was the poster.
 |
| Poster of the film upon its screening in the cinema in Paris, with the original name "Mignonnes" |
On September 4, Maymouna Dikouré said she received death threats after the poster was published. She confirmed that Netflix's co-CEO, Ted Sarandos, called her directly and apologized for the poster that caused the uproar, which she had not seen before.
But it's not just poster anymore.
Last week, the movie began showing on Netflix, and since that time, many social media users around the world have been demanding to cancel the Netflix service.
The scene of the little girls dancing provoked them, and they said that Netflix "promotes pedophilia (sexual abuse of children)," and many criticized the parents for allowing their daughters to appear like this in the film, and many called for an investigation into how the movie was filmed and whether there was a violation of the rights of the girls actress. Note that the matter is not limited to dance shots, there are more than one scene in which girls naively try to lure men around them through the movements they learned from what they see on social media.
The director insists people have not understood the idea of her film.
She says she saw herself a girl group of the same age dancing like this, so she spent a year and a half talking with more than a hundred girls from all over Paris between the ages of ten and eleven.
She explains that the work team was accompanied by a psychological counselor, and that the team obtained the approval of the authorities responsible for child protection in the French government, as she wrote in the Washington Post article.
In the movie, we feel that the girls are innocent and similar to their age, but they start to imitate adult singers and watch their shows on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, all with the aim of winning the dance competition to become famous.
"Seeing them under all this pressure at a heartbreaking early life," Décoré wrote. "Their experience on social media was the reference for the film."
“We, as adults, did not give children the tools to enable them to grow up healthy in our society. I wanted to open people's eyes to what is really going on in schools and on social media, to force them to confront pictures of girls wearing makeup and wearing dance clothes that resemble the clothes of their favorite pop stars. ".
Amy's Dream - New Netflix Movie "Cuties"
But there is another scene in the film that can be described as important and influential, which no one has talked about.
At the start of the movie Amy feels her mom is not feeling well. You see her mumbling with an older woman who has her place among the women of the Senegalese community in France, and when she asks her mother about her, and about her traveling father, she does not get an answer.
Outwardly, the mother is strong and compact. Once, by coincidence, Amy hid under the bed in her parents' bedroom, and she heard her mother speaking to people on the mobile and telling them that her husband had engaged to a second woman from Senegal, and that she would prepare a wedding for him when he returned with his new wife to France.
In one call, the mother - sitting in the bed - does not control herself, so she turns off the phone in the face of the person on the other end of the line, and cries painfully. And Amy - hiding under the bed - is also crying. We see many tears. Crying without a voice.
All the time, Amy sees her mother preparing her husband's room - the groom - in the cramped family home, and it seems that the community "leader" encourages the mother to continue like this "so that she will not be criticized." And we see the gift boxes that the father sent from Senegal with beautiful traditional clothes for his wife and children to wear, so that they look beautiful on his wedding day.
We hear Amy once telling her companion in another scene from the movie that her dream is that her father will never return from Senegal.
"Don't Go to the Party" - New Netflix movie "Cuties"
The duration of the film is about an hour and a half, in which we learn about the life of Amy, the little girl on the verge of adolescence, who did not have a life of her own; All she did was take care of her two younger brothers, and listen to the religious and social teachings when she went with her mother to meet the community's members, as she belonged to a Muslim community coming from Senegal.
Her life changes when a group of girls at school catches her eye as they prepare for a dance competition and tries her best to join them.
In the film, there is a great criticism of the way children use social media, which are easy to access, watch everything on them, and imitate them in order to gain fame and "like".
And it includes an aspect of the life of immigrant communities to Europe, specifically the lives of women there.
In the movie, there is a great sense of silent solidarity from Amy, the eleven-year-old, with her mother, who is betrayed by her companion and marrying a second. She feels sympathy for her mother, who is unable to express that pain - except in secret. We feel Amy's anger and hate for her father from start to film - this pent-up anger is the backbone of the movie.
Dykouria says the movie is the story of her life between two cultures. “People often ask me about the oppression that women are subjected to in societies that are considered more traditional. I always ask: But isn't the object of a woman’s body in Western Europe and the United States of America another form of oppression? If girls feel at a young age that they will be judged ( By appearance) How much freedom do they really have in this life?
At the end of the movie, Amy refuses to go to her father's wedding (knowing that polygamy has been forbidden in France since 1993 - and the film does not explain how the second marriage took place). The leader of the community scolds her and asks her to wear her new, colorful dress, and tries to force her to do so violently, so her mother defends her and allows her to do what she wants.
For the first time, Amy talks about what is on her mind and cries as she says to her mother, "Please, Mama, don't go to the party."
BBC
