First things first. I've seen the film. I liked the film. The controversial dance scenes do work in context, though I found them uncomfortable to watch and in poor taste - deliberately so. Still, I doubt the film would have suffered much if they'd been toned down.
For those of you who have somehow not heard, Netflix recently premiered the French film "Cuties" on its service, about the travails of an eleven year-old Senegalese Muslim immigrant girl named Amy (Fathia Youssouf) who is growing up in France. She finds her traditional home life stifling, and becomes fixated on a group of girls from her school who have formed an amateur dance group - the Cuties. Amy befriends the girls and starts dressing in more revealing clothes. She steals a phone and finds videos online of adult dancers, who she copies. As she becomes more and more rebellious, her home life starts falling apart. When she posts a pornographic photo on social media, she's rejected by the Cuties. The film has drawn criticism for having the young actresses perform sexually suggestive dance moves onscreen, some involving simulated sex, though these scenes are meant to be viewed as shocking and disturbing.
It's been fascinating to see how a fairly obscure French art film has blown up into a moral outrage in America. "Cuties" director Maïmouna Doucouré intended to depict the difficulties of navigating modern girlhood, reflecting her own background as a Senegalese immigrant. The girls are shown to be exposed to sexually charged images and copying them without understanding what they're doing. Amy receives mostly positive reactions to her efforts up until she unwittingly goes too far, and then the consequences are dire. The film is clearly against sexualizing preteen girls - except that the filmmakers may have ended up sexualizing preteen girls in the course of making the film. But while I agree that the filmmakers crossed a line and deserve criticism, none of the film's content is sexuallly explicit, and the incendiary reaction has been totally out of proportion. The Netflix marketing of "Cuties" was the first to draw fire, with a poster showing the girls in their skimpy dance outfits in the middle of a performance. Then trailers and clips of the dance performances started circulating - mostly out of context - and Doucouré started getting death threats.
So, we have a couple of different things to keep in mind here. First, "Cuties" is a film that probably never would have been made in the U.S., where the culture around sex and sexuality is very different from France. You can suggest all the perversity you like in the U.S., but even the tamest sexual acts are rarely depicted diretly, and any perceived danger to children can sink a project. Still, these content controversies come up every few years, usually involving coming-of-age films featuring underage kids exploring their sexuality. The thing is, these are usually tiny indie and art house films, like Larry Clark's "Ken Park," that play very limited audiences. In the past, most of these films would get into a ratings fight with an MPAA, get a tiny release, and then disappear into obscurity. "Cuties," on the other hand, was sold like something for general audiences. Because it was on Netflix, it skipped the MPAA entirely, as well as the layers and layers of censorship and curation that a piece of media has to go through to be shown on traditional TV platforms. Netflix released "Cuties" with a TV-MA rating, but its ad campaign made it look similar to shows like "Cheer" and "Dance Moms" that feature young performers and are for general audiences.
I think it's that disconnect more than anything else that is fanning the flames here. Most of the people angriest about "Cuties" have not watched the film, and don't watch similar content. It's perfectly legitimate to be upset about the preteen and teenage actresses who participated in the film being put into a compromising position by the filmmakers. However, the calls to cancel Netflix won't stop films like this from being made. The French film industry is totally behind Doucouré, and there has not been a similar outrage around "Cuties" in France. The only thing that will happen if Netflix does drop the film is what usually happens to controversial films like this - they become harder to see, and thus easier for mainstream American audiences to pretend that they don't exist.
In the meantime, "Cuties" has become one of the most streamed titles on the platform since its premiere. My hope is that all the attention will help to shine a light on the film's concerns - the easy access that kids have to adult content online, and the mixed messages girls see about womanhood. These are important topics, and I hope more media tackle them - but more responsibly in the future.
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