Cuties

Not so cute.

Netflix

American conservatives are up in arms about this French Netflix movie about a group of tween girls from the projects in Paris who like to dance like strippers. Politicians like Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton, those paragons of moral probity, have chimed in, and people are calling the FBI, rallying the country to cancel Netflix, and alerting Congress about the perils of child pornography. It seems to me that their outrage serves as a convenient distraction from the devastation committed daily by Trump and the Republican party, but let’s take a look at the film.

Directed by Maimouna Doucouré, a woman, Cuties is the story of Amy, a 11 year-old Senegalese girl from a traditional Muslim family in a working class neighborhood in Paris, who has troubles at home and is fascinated by a gang of unruly classmates who are training for a dance contest. Amy sees the humiliation that her mother endures due to some of her religious customs, while she herself tries to integrate at school, torn between two worlds where she doesn’t quite fit. She is drawn to the tween bullies who dance with fierce abandon and wear tight-fitting skimpy clothes.

Some movies aim to denounce certain social issues while painstakingly depicting precisely what offends them, undermining their own argument. Cuties is such a film. Doucouré wants to call attention to the way young girls are sexualized by our culture…