On Wednesday, Netflix releases “Cuties” (“Mignonnes”), the remarkable first feature from the French filmmaker Maïmouna Doucouré. Unfortunately, the platform’s misleading advertising has given rise to a scurrilous campaign against the film itself. The promotional image, showing young girls in bikini-like clothing dancing in provocative ways, matched with an inaccurate description, has been taken to suggest that the film celebrates children’s sexualized behavior. In fact, the subject of the film is exactly the opposite: it dramatizes the difficulties of growing up female in a sexualized and commercialized media culture. I doubt that the scandal-mongers (who include some well-known figures of the far right) have actually seen “Cuties,” but some elements of the film that weren’t presented in the advertising would surely prove irritating to them: it’s the story of a girl’s outrage at, and defiance of, a patriarchal order.
The girl is Amy Diop (Fathia Youssouf), an eleven-year-old of Senegalese descent, who lives in France with her observant Muslim family. At the film’s beginning, she moves with her mother, Mariam (Maïmouna Gueye), and her two younger brothers into a new apartment in a Parisian housing project. The apartment has a secret: a room, kept locked, that Amy is ordered to avoid. Amy (short for Aminata, and pronounced with a short “a,” like the French word ami) is a dutiful child, kept in line lovingly but sternly by Mariam and by “Auntie,” her great-aunt (Mbissine Thérèse Diop), who’s steeped in traditions that she passes along to her niece. Amy, who’s quiet and shy, is also socially isolated—she has no cell phone, knows no one at school, and isn’t inclined to express herself or introduce herself. As for her father, he’s away, visiting the family’s homeland. Much is being made of the festive plans for his return—but Amy learns, accidentally, that the point of his trip is to take a second wife, and that he’ll soon be returning to Paris with her. The sealed room in the family’s apartment will be the new wife’s bridal chamber.
Amy takes this news as a betrayal of her mother—especially after she discovers that Mariam, who is made miserable by the news, is being coerced, by Auntie and by the entire social structure of their community, into celebrating her husband’s polygamy and welcoming the new bride into her home. At an all-female prayer meeting that Amy and Mariam attend in the building’s common room, the preacher, a woman, decrees, “We must remain modest. We must obey our husbands.” Auntie tells Amy, “Do everything you can to please your mother.” Now that order of modesty strikes Amy as part of a system that subjugates women, and pleasing her mother means deferring to that system. Instantly, Amy enters a state of revolt, which is all the more emotionally wrenching for her lack of a vocabulary to discuss her feelings and her lack of friends to discuss them with. She associates modesty with misogyny and obedience with oppression, and so she acts out, overthrowing both in a series of increasingly reckless actions.
Soon after moving in, Amy sees a neighbor and classmate, Angelica (Médina El Aidi-Azouni), doing a hip-hop dance while doing laundry in the building’s basement. Soon thereafter, Amy sees Angelica similarly dancing with three other girls near an abandoned train yard. At first, they insult her and throw rocks at her. When she approaches them at school, they tell her that they’re preparing for a dance competition (the group’s name is the Cuties, les Mignonnes). Amy knows that the girls are trouble—she sees them defying teachers and getting disciplined in the schoolyard and running wild in a supermarket—but she resolves to join them. She soon finds that their dancing is inseparable from their sexual curiosity and brazen provocations, which are matched by their ignorance about sex. Angelica, in particular, is a gleeful troublemaker, at times seeming nearly sociopathic, as when she steals her older brother’s work shirt, slams another girl’s computer to the floor, and assaults another member of the group. As a sort of virtual hazing at school, the Cuties push Amy into the boys’ bathroom to video-record a boy’s genitals. Her membership in the group involves her self-aware misconduct, transgressions that she undertakes quickly and coldly: stealing a cell phone from a cousin, stealing money from her mother, fighting with another girl, making herself an object of social-media scandal, even several acts of potentially grave violence. For Amy, belonging to the Cuties means more than a new activity or a new set of friends—it means forging for herself a new, self-chosen identity, which she clings to desperately, at great risk and great cost.
Before becoming a filmmaker, Doucouré was in the sciences (she has a degree in biology), and there’s something admirably analytical about her cinematic methods. Though “Cuties” is a sharply dramatic film that sticks closely to Amy throughout and observes her actions in detail, Doucouré brings background ideas to the foreground, inviting sociological and abstract considerations alongside the sharp delineation of character.
The subject of “Cuties” isn’t twerking; it’s children, especially poor and nonwhite children, who are deprived of the resources—the education, the emotional support, the open family discussion—to put sexualized media and pop culture into perspective.
The girl is Amy Diop (Fathia Youssouf), an eleven-year-old of Senegalese descent, who lives in France with her observant Muslim family. At the film’s beginning, she moves with her mother, Mariam (Maïmouna Gueye), and her two younger brothers into a new apartment in a Parisian housing project. The apartment has a secret: a room, kept locked, that Amy is ordered to avoid. Amy (short for Aminata, and pronounced with a short “a,” like the French word ami) is a dutiful child, kept in line lovingly but sternly by Mariam and by “Auntie,” her great-aunt (Mbissine Thérèse Diop), who’s steeped in traditions that she passes along to her niece. Amy, who’s quiet and shy, is also socially isolated—she has no cell phone, knows no one at school, and isn’t inclined to express herself or introduce herself. As for her father, he’s away, visiting the family’s homeland. Much is being made of the festive plans for his return—but Amy learns, accidentally, that the point of his trip is to take a second wife, and that he’ll soon be returning to Paris with her. The sealed room in the family’s apartment will be the new wife’s bridal chamber.Amy takes this news as a betrayal of her mother—especially after she discovers that Mariam, who is made miserable by the news, is being coerced, by Auntie and by the entire social structure of their community, into celebrating her husband’s polygamy and welcoming the new bride into her home. At an all-female prayer meeting that Amy and Mariam attend in the building’s common room, the preacher, a woman, decrees, “We must remain modest. We must obey our husbands.” Auntie tells Amy, “Do everything you can to please your mother.” Now that order of modesty strikes Amy as part of a system that subjugates women, and pleasing her mother means deferring to that system. Instantly, Amy enters a state of revolt, which is all the more emotionally wrenching for her lack of a vocabulary to discuss her feelings and her lack of friends to discuss them with. She associates modesty with misogyny and obedience with oppression, and so she acts out, overthrowing both in a series of increasingly reckless actions.
Soon after moving in, Amy sees a neighbor and classmate, Angelica (Médina El Aidi-Azouni), doing a hip-hop dance while doing laundry in the building’s basement. Soon thereafter, Amy sees Angelica similarly dancing with three other girls near an abandoned train yard. At first, they insult her and throw rocks at her. When she approaches them at school, they tell her that they’re preparing for a dance competition (the group’s name is the Cuties, les Mignonnes). Amy knows that the girls are trouble—she sees them defying teachers and getting disciplined in the schoolyard and running wild in a supermarket—but she resolves to join them. She soon finds that their dancing is inseparable from their sexual curiosity and brazen provocations, which are matched by their ignorance about sex. Angelica, in particular, is a gleeful troublemaker, at times seeming nearly sociopathic, as when she steals her older brother’s work shirt, slams another girl’s computer to the floor, and assaults another member of the group. As a sort of virtual hazing at school, the Cuties push Amy into the boys’ bathroom to video-record a boy’s genitals. Her membership in the group involves her self-aware misconduct, transgressions that she undertakes quickly and coldly: stealing a cell phone from a cousin, stealing money from her mother, fighting with another girl, making herself an object of social-media scandal, even several acts of potentially grave violence. For Amy, belonging to the Cuties means more than a new activity or a new set of friends—it means forging for herself a new, self-chosen identity, which she clings to desperately, at great risk and great cost.
Before becoming a filmmaker, Doucouré was in the sciences (she has a degree in biology), and there’s something admirably analytical about her cinematic methods. Though “Cuties” is a sharply dramatic film that sticks closely to Amy throughout and observes her actions in detail, Doucouré brings background ideas to the foreground, inviting sociological and abstract considerations alongside the sharp delineation of character.
The subject of “Cuties” isn’t twerking; it’s children, especially poor and nonwhite children, who are deprived of the resources—the education, the emotional support, the open family discussion—to put sexualized media and pop culture into perspective.
by Richard Brody, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Netflix
