If you’re perturbed by adults directing prepubescent girls to twerk and pantomime oral sex while barely clothed for global consumption, professional film critics may accuse you of scandal-mongering. If you’re even more shocked by the cinema elite’s reflexive embrace of Cuties, well, you shouldn’t be. The lionization of the exploitation of women in children is par for the course in the film world, and the celebration of Netflix’s global release of Sundance-winning Cuties is just a part of a greater pattern. To understand the sort of rot that not even the #MeToo movement can expunge from elite cinema, one only needs to turn to a different film festival, Cannes, considered the most important on the planet.
From being turned into Harvey Weinstein’s playground once a year to absurdly sexist dress codes, Cannes has spent the past few years purging secret sexist scandals from the sun-soaked Riviera. But there’s a very open sexism built into the very system of the festival, and one award in 2013 perfectly describes the sort of culture that loves the soft porn of Cuties.
Seven years ago, two women joined the only other woman to have ever won the Palme d’Or, arguably the most prestigious award in the film industry. There’s just one catch. The award, which had previously only ever gone to directors, went to the two leading actresses as well as the director of Blue Is The Warmest Color, the lesbian drama most famous for a fully nude, uninterrupted, seven-minute sex scene so explicit that rumors that the acts were unsimulated were only debunked when the actresses claimed they wore silicon shields over their nether regions.
The previously unknown leads, Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux, were just 18 and 27, respectively, while filming the movie. More than 10 minutes of its entire three-hour run time feature fully nude sex scenes.
“Of course, it was kind of humiliating sometimes, I was feeling like a prostitute,” Seydoux later said of whether she felt like she was acting out a male fantasy. “Of course, he uses that sometimes. He was using three cameras, and when you have to fake your orgasm for six hours.” The line Seydoux said she wouldn’t cross was literal oral sex, hence the film’s famous plastic shields. Violence in the film, however, was not unsimulated. The film’s director, Abdellatif Kechiche, made Seydoux literally and repeatedly hit Exarchopoulos in a fight scene, according to the actresses. Seydoux said that she’d “never” work with Kechiche again.
Unsurprisingly, the film was largely panned by the LGBTQ community, which saw it for what it was: an overt appeal to male satisfaction. Compare it to other nuanced, critically acclaimed lesbian films of the art-house drama such as Carol or Disobedience, and it’s not hard to see why.
But that didn’t stop critics, both American and French, from salivating over it. Richard Brody, the New Yorker critic who gave Cuties rave reviews and lambasted conservatives as “scandal-mongers,” lusted over Blue, lauding the sex scenes for including “terrifyingly vulnerable performances,” claiming “they capture the very vulnerability, the uninhibited, un-self-sparing exertion to exhaustion that marks the actors’ performances.”
Put it back in your pants, please. But with reviews like that, of course the cinematic elite felt justified in their decision.
So how did the Cannes jury justify breaking all festival precedent to award two actresses the Palme d’Or while snubbing both for best actress?
“For me, the film is a great love story that made all of us feel like we were privileged to be flies on the wall, to be invited into this story of deep love and deep heartbreak,” jury president Stephen Spielberg said at the time. “The director did not put any constraints on the narrative, and we were absolutely spellbound by the amazing performances of the two actresses and especially the way the director observed his characters and just let the characters breathe.”
“Just let[ting] the characters breathe” is a funny way of saying a powerful straight man made desperate ingenues strip and simulate such explicit sex that they had to debunk that it didn’t actually happen. Especially considering Cannes’s history of snubbing women, the statement on elite cinema, and more importantly, the media that lauds it, unquestionably, is resounding.
The message is clear: Stories directed by women will always be overlooked for those directed by men on the merits, so if you want to gain entry into the most elite boy’s club in the cinematic world, you must bare your butt, toss out your breasts, and spend seven minutes with only a thin layer of plastic dividing you from “acting” and completely consummating sex acts in a blatant performance of pornography.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, Kechiche was accused of sexual assault in 2018 by a Parisian partygoer who alleged to French prosecutors that he assaulted her when she passed out at a dinner party. His next film at Cannes included a 13-minute unsimulated sex scene.
So Cannes finally broke its own rules to gift two women, one of who is barely over the age of consent, a Palme d’Or, not for her brilliance but for acquiescing to an arguably abusive director’s demands of borderline hardcore porn. And this happened, in large part, because of the culture around cinema that celebrated that. Are we surprised that the next step would turn the literal children of Cuties into the object of Cannes’s insatiable lust?
