In its release of Cuties, the French film that won a best directing award at Sundance, Netflix has gifted every QAnon conspiracy theorist the confirmation that if you dress up pedophilic soft porn with the guise of woke cultural commentary and cinematographic pretension, our cultural elite is willing to not just condone but celebrate the gross sexualization of prepubescent children.
Cuties, which is about a Muslim girl of Senegalese origin in Paris, has earned a 90% critic approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. French critics lauded the film, and stateside, Richard Brody at the New Yorker deemed it an “extraordinary” and “remarkable” directorial debut for Maimouna Doucoure (who, much like the film’s main character, was born and raised in Paris by Senegalese parents).
“‘Cuties’ dramatizes what people of color and immigrants endure as a result of isolation and ghettoization, of not being represented culturally and politically — and of not being represented in French national mythology,” Brody writes. “Its underlying subject is the connection of personal identity to public identity — and the urgency of transforming the very notion of French identity, of changing the idea of who’s considered the representative face of France. That idea is brought to the fore in an extraordinary, brief, symbolic ending; it’s enough to give a right-winger a conniption.”
Actually, as a right-winger who initially overlooked the original marketing fracas, I went ahead and watched the film. I now need a lobotomy and a Xanax (or four).
The plot of Cuties pits 11 year-old protagonist Amy’s uber-Muslim home life against the hypersexualized secular life she vies to join. While Amy’s father is back in Senegal finding a second wife to bring back to Paris, Amy stumbles upon classmates who’ve formed a quasi-clandestine dance group called the “Cuties.” Over the course of the film, Amy’s increasingly bad-girl antics escalate from stealing a phone and twerking for sport to posting a picture of her nude nether regions to the internet and nearly drowning a rival by body-slamming her into a river. In the ham-fisted symbolism of the conclusion, Amy escapes her father’s wedding to his second wife to perform in the Cuties’ big dance competition — only to freak out after five minutes of a (barely) clothed strip-club routine and go back home to hug her mother.
There might be an interesting enough story in there, albeit an extraordinarily simplistic one dividing the universe into ultrasecular and ultrareligious sexism. After all, the problem of extremely Muslim immigrants performing female genital mutilation on their daughters and practicing polygamy is very real, and movies like Girlhood, released in 2014, have painted beautiful coming-of-age stories over the backdrop of France’s hostile secular culture dissuading cultural assimilation among immigrants. But the dichotomy of Cuties is farcical, and the overt displays of pedophilic posturing ride the line between outright disgusting and outright criminal.
Recent films have told visceral tragedies of girls criminally sexualized with the sensitivity and raw honesty that they deserve. In HBO’s film The Tale, which depicted flashbacks of the protagonist realizing her “older boyfriend” from her childhood was a literal rapist, scenes depicting the antagonist’s predation were treated as such, and though none of the scenes depicted nudity or much bare skin, the filmmakers wisely used a body double for scenes insinuating sex. And though Game of Thrones took plenty of flak for depicting rape scenes, the cinematography of its rape scenes clearly differentiated from its sultry sex scenes.
Cuties luxuriates in fixating on the non-existent curves of its pre-pubescent stars. The choreography would fit perfectly in a Cardi B music video, and the camera work creates entire scenes that feel like the intro to a sex tape. Just as bad as the actual content of the film is why it exists. The film makes no attempt to show young girls as they are but rather portrays them as the French film elite wants them to be.
Tween girls certainly do dumb things to appear more grown-up than they actually are, but in a pre-Instagrammed world, that meant rolling up your skirt and getting yelled at in the privacy of school, not twerking for global consumption. Cuties begs us to believe that awkward tween girls who can’t talk to boys laughing also know how to mimic blowjobs as they gyrate their hips to please totally enthralled adults. To us plebians, that’s not just horrifying. It’s factually inaccurate.
But to the French intelligentsia that persists in elite cinema, that’s the dream.
Consider that French elites such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault petitioned the government in living memory to decriminalize sexual relationships between adults and children under France’s age of consent, just 15 years old. Roman Polanski is still feted at French film festivals, and until recently, by American celebrities. And Jeffery Epstein traversed the globe beloved by billionaires and the celebutante class while he went unpunished for the mass trafficking and rapes of children for decades.
Throw Netflix and the critic class’s embrace of Cuties together, and is there any wonder why the ranks of the QAnon-curious have exploded into the mainstream? The full QAnon conspiracy theory is deeply complex and rife with incentives for violence and anti-Semitism. But if all you know of the conspiracy theory is that global elites engage in a mass pedophilia ring, how does that seem less likely than the notion that the entire patrician class is simply okay with pedophiles and the sexualization of children, but they don’t participate in it?
The only people who will benefit more from Cuties than the perverts who have new fodder for their depraved lusts are the conspiracy theorists who have yet one more piece of elite celebration of sexualizing children to confirm their belief that the ruling class’s pedophile problem is not just mere malice but also an entire clandestine operation.
