I live under a rock, and so I was one of the last of my friends to see the highly controversial film "Cuties". I sat through one viewing, and I think that was all I needed to see.
I've honestly seen films on this sort of subject (being a girl on the cusp of womanhood) that have stylistically handled it better, such as the 2014 film "The Fits". "Cuties" is one of those French art films that pushes boundaries for "art" and shock value, constantly hitting us over the head with heavy-handed implications that female innocence in the digital age is dead. The girls in this film, not even in high school yet, curse like sailors and dress inappropriately, an awkward and painful spectacle for the viewer as we sit there watching the main character's slow downfall into competitive perversion. It's vulgar, it's shocking, and yet, by the time it's over, all I was thinking to myself was, "okay, that was REALLY creepy... what else is new?" And I say this because, in an era of TikTok, Instagram, children being given their own cell phone in preschool, iPads in classrooms, none of this sort of thing surprises me anymore. Maybe fifteen years ago the film would have left a bigger impact on me. Now, having been born in 1998 myself and having grown up with this same kind of pressure and exposure to sexuality as a female, I'm just desensitized to this type of thing. The problem with Cuties is that it's telling us something we already knew, all while proposing nothing that can be done to change a tragic trajectory for today's hopeless youth.
If we can even begin to set aside the glaring problems with the choices made in filming Cuties, which is what created much of the controversy in the first place, Cuties would still be a flawed way to send a message. We see the film try to blame the media for its portrayal of women and girls, and yet this media is clearly not for children, so who's exposing them to it? We see that the innocent feminine role models for preteens of yesteryear, like Alex Mack and the Babysitter's Club, have been replaced with promiscuous, filtered adult models - again, not for children, and yet the film seems to focus more on the influence of the media and sexual predators than on the parent's role in protecting their children from bad influences. We see an increasingly digital world that children that age should not have unsupervised access to, and yet the film doesn't really get into this much, either. It seems to blame the way that our society sexualizes women at a younger and younger age, and yet, this is nothing new - in fact, if anything, it's decreased from the "free love" of the 1960's and 1970's, a time back when films like "Valerie and Her Week of Wonders" and "The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane" were all the rage (they'd be scandalous today; back then, they were known as "all in good fun"). We forget that it was only the 1930's when celebrity Loretta Lynn, a fourteen-year-old girl who didn't know what sex even was, married a grown man who forced her to have sex on their honeymoon. She was not alone in this; the age in which minor children could marry in the western world has always been strikingly low up until the past few decades. The sexualitzation of women and girls has always existed. It was just swept under the carpet more often in the past. The message that this is problematic has always been there long before Cuties: we see recent titles like 2018's "The Tale" address how the sexual revolution of the 1970's glossed over a young girl's traumatic experience being groomed and molested by an adult married couple, or 2016's "Neon Demon" showing how a young girl aspiring to be a model pretends to be a grown woman to fit in, facing lecherous sexual predators at every turn... but what sets Cuties apart is that its message that the sexualization of youth in the media is bad doesn't quite know how to propose a solution, while other films indicated cathartic changes that we can make in ourselves as young women and girls in a sexual world. Cuties doesn't dare suggest maybe getting involved with your child's life, looking into what they're accessing on social media or maybe not giving a child that age their own digital device, nor does it suggest knowing better who your children's friends are, or teaching your child to respect themselves enough to be careful - hell, it doesn't even really put much blame on sexual predators, who are the obvious overarching culprit! It blames the media - not the parents, not the predators, not the digital devices - and it's even more problematic to blame the media when the film then goes and gives an overtly sexual and creepy portrayal of its minor child actors for a mainstream viewing audience. Any good that could have come from Cuties was lost there. It indicates that part of the problem is the main character's Islamic household where her parents, new immigrants, don't quite understand the culture they've moved into (theirs is a household of polygamy, neglect and the brink of poverty), but, again, the film doesn't quite dwell enough on this to suggest that this is the main problem, that the main character has no protective role models at home looking out for her. It's the media's fault, it's society's fault, and in the end, young Amy has to seek nostalgia and innocence all on her own, as her mother leaves her for her husband's wedding to a second wife.
Stylistically, Cuties is again forgettable. While not necessarily bland, its soundtrack is nothing special, its cinematography isn't all that groundbreaking, and its actors are good but not great. The film's attempt to touch on so many themes at once: problematic aspects of Islam, cliques and bullying, social media, youth behavioural problems, domestic abuse, polygamy, immigration, poverty, cultural barriers, dance symbolism and so-forth - it's such a jumble of ideas that any coherent message is either totally lost, or never existed to begin with.
Cuties is simply too behind-the-times and clueless to realize that its thematic material is old news, and that you cannot address a subject by skating loosely around it or by doing the very thing - sexualizing children - that you believe is wrong.
I've honestly seen films on this sort of subject (being a girl on the cusp of womanhood) that have stylistically handled it better, such as the 2014 film "The Fits". "Cuties" is one of those French art films that pushes boundaries for "art" and shock value, constantly hitting us over the head with heavy-handed implications that female innocence in the digital age is dead. The girls in this film, not even in high school yet, curse like sailors and dress inappropriately, an awkward and painful spectacle for the viewer as we sit there watching the main character's slow downfall into competitive perversion. It's vulgar, it's shocking, and yet, by the time it's over, all I was thinking to myself was, "okay, that was REALLY creepy... what else is new?" And I say this because, in an era of TikTok, Instagram, children being given their own cell phone in preschool, iPads in classrooms, none of this sort of thing surprises me anymore. Maybe fifteen years ago the film would have left a bigger impact on me. Now, having been born in 1998 myself and having grown up with this same kind of pressure and exposure to sexuality as a female, I'm just desensitized to this type of thing. The problem with Cuties is that it's telling us something we already knew, all while proposing nothing that can be done to change a tragic trajectory for today's hopeless youth.
If we can even begin to set aside the glaring problems with the choices made in filming Cuties, which is what created much of the controversy in the first place, Cuties would still be a flawed way to send a message. We see the film try to blame the media for its portrayal of women and girls, and yet this media is clearly not for children, so who's exposing them to it? We see that the innocent feminine role models for preteens of yesteryear, like Alex Mack and the Babysitter's Club, have been replaced with promiscuous, filtered adult models - again, not for children, and yet the film seems to focus more on the influence of the media and sexual predators than on the parent's role in protecting their children from bad influences. We see an increasingly digital world that children that age should not have unsupervised access to, and yet the film doesn't really get into this much, either. It seems to blame the way that our society sexualizes women at a younger and younger age, and yet, this is nothing new - in fact, if anything, it's decreased from the "free love" of the 1960's and 1970's, a time back when films like "Valerie and Her Week of Wonders" and "The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane" were all the rage (they'd be scandalous today; back then, they were known as "all in good fun"). We forget that it was only the 1930's when celebrity Loretta Lynn, a fourteen-year-old girl who didn't know what sex even was, married a grown man who forced her to have sex on their honeymoon. She was not alone in this; the age in which minor children could marry in the western world has always been strikingly low up until the past few decades. The sexualitzation of women and girls has always existed. It was just swept under the carpet more often in the past. The message that this is problematic has always been there long before Cuties: we see recent titles like 2018's "The Tale" address how the sexual revolution of the 1970's glossed over a young girl's traumatic experience being groomed and molested by an adult married couple, or 2016's "Neon Demon" showing how a young girl aspiring to be a model pretends to be a grown woman to fit in, facing lecherous sexual predators at every turn... but what sets Cuties apart is that its message that the sexualization of youth in the media is bad doesn't quite know how to propose a solution, while other films indicated cathartic changes that we can make in ourselves as young women and girls in a sexual world. Cuties doesn't dare suggest maybe getting involved with your child's life, looking into what they're accessing on social media or maybe not giving a child that age their own digital device, nor does it suggest knowing better who your children's friends are, or teaching your child to respect themselves enough to be careful - hell, it doesn't even really put much blame on sexual predators, who are the obvious overarching culprit! It blames the media - not the parents, not the predators, not the digital devices - and it's even more problematic to blame the media when the film then goes and gives an overtly sexual and creepy portrayal of its minor child actors for a mainstream viewing audience. Any good that could have come from Cuties was lost there. It indicates that part of the problem is the main character's Islamic household where her parents, new immigrants, don't quite understand the culture they've moved into (theirs is a household of polygamy, neglect and the brink of poverty), but, again, the film doesn't quite dwell enough on this to suggest that this is the main problem, that the main character has no protective role models at home looking out for her. It's the media's fault, it's society's fault, and in the end, young Amy has to seek nostalgia and innocence all on her own, as her mother leaves her for her husband's wedding to a second wife.
Stylistically, Cuties is again forgettable. While not necessarily bland, its soundtrack is nothing special, its cinematography isn't all that groundbreaking, and its actors are good but not great. The film's attempt to touch on so many themes at once: problematic aspects of Islam, cliques and bullying, social media, youth behavioural problems, domestic abuse, polygamy, immigration, poverty, cultural barriers, dance symbolism and so-forth - it's such a jumble of ideas that any coherent message is either totally lost, or never existed to begin with.
Cuties is simply too behind-the-times and clueless to realize that its thematic material is old news, and that you cannot address a subject by skating loosely around it or by doing the very thing - sexualizing children - that you believe is wrong.