Cuties
2020-09-18
I saw Cuties.
Oddly, this movie got drawn on partisan grounds. I really don’t want to talk about that; there’s a lot of binary thinkers who have either wholeheartedly praised or wholeheartedly condemned the movie, without seeing it. It must be said that it is neither wholly awful nor wholly pure. People decrying it have very good points, and people defending it have real points.
Child Pornography
It’s not… really CP. There are extended sequences of 11-year-old girls dancing seductively, in tight and/or short clothes, doing everything that you’ve seen adult dancers do on-stage at a strip club. The camera does closeups, slowmo. Every screenshot or clip you’ve seen of the movie is probably accurate. The worst thing, to my mind, was a shot of a rival girl who flashes the camera at one point.
All of this sounds like someone straining not to describe it as child pornography, and frankly I don’t actually know if I can say it isn’t, because I’m not very clear on where the line is drawn with child pornography. Does it have to include nudity? Does it just have to be explicitly and aggressively sexual? I expect this doesn’t actually qualify, since it has a story surrounding it, and is distributed widely and the creators haven’t been rounded up on charges - but it is definitely difficult to say it "isn’t CP", just that it "isn’t really CP".
What it is
The summary of the movie is that it’s a coming-of-age film about an immigrant girl who is caught between a traditional family that believes women should get married, cook, and build a family, and the western world which seems to believe women should get as sexy as possible and never marry. The family of the main character is in ruins, with the father "taking a second wife" (they’re Sengalese Muslims) which is shown to hurt the mother and alienate the daughter. The daughter sees her mother, who is fat and unattractive, as someone that men abandon - and she sees the sexy dancers as the ones people can’t look away from. She’s alone and isolated and the turns to sexy dancing (remember, she’s 11) to be liked.
The moral of the story is ostensibly that being super sexual isn’t a path to happiness, but the ending is so rushed and tacked-on that it feels like a reshoot.
Film quality
Alright, look, we can’t talk about the movie without admitting Cuties is a poorly made film, from top to bottom. It’s bad enough that I can’t exactly tell if they just had awful writing, the editor cut out important scenes, or the director really wanted it to come out like this. I’m not sure who to blame, but the outcome is a pretty bad movie.
Here’s an example. In one scene, the main character looks like a pretty normal kid, in the next she’s done up with pink lipstick, a poofy hairstyle she’s never had, tight black pants, and a shirt with cleavage. We’ve never seen the main character with any of these things before, prior to the right panel the most she’s done is wear tight jean shorts and tie her t-shirt.
We go from this shot:
To this shot:
With no explanation of how she got that way. How did she buy the clothes, where did she get the idea for that look, how did she leave the house without her traditional mom harping on her - nothing about this is explained, foreshadowed, or otherwise made clear with any kind of context. These two shots, which are one right after the other, are just as confusing to you as they were to me.
The ending, as I mentioned above, is equally jarring. The main character goes from being prone on the floor, smiling while twerking and making a handjob motion with her arm to literally running home to mama and everything is ok. That’s the ending of the movie. There’s no tension, no release, nothing to indicate why she would feel this way. She goes from dancing with her friends to crying home to mama.
This shot:
Immediately after some of the worst CGI confetti I’ve ever seen (seriously you don’t even need tracking marks to get better tracking and matched lighting than this), she cries and runs home. Where her mother - who has spent the whole movie decrying that her daughter might be possessed because she’s stealing and whoring, who the last time we saw her took off her shoe and beat her daughter - ends up inexplicably defending her and hugs her.
We could keep going, but the entire movie is like this. It tries to build a compelling character drama, but the characters don’t actually make sense. It’s a bad movie.
Writing failures
I want to linger on the writing for a moment. There are a few ways to do this kind of movie well, but the film is so negligent that it doesn’t really take the time to learn from the past.
Tug Of War
One theme they seem to have wanted in the movie is traditional muslim culture versus contemporary western youth culture. That could work. But they never show any tug-of-war between the two. The main character decides from the first shot that she doesn’t want to be traditional. The scenes after show her entranced by dancing, and that’s pretty much it. At no point until the very end does she show any willingness to go back.
Here’s the thing, it’s not a tug of war if one side isn’t pulling. Think back to Breaking Bad (yes, I’m comparing a 62-episode American TV show to a 90min foreign film, i know there are differences in what one can expect) - Walter White’s wife, Skylar, is constantly trying to bring him back to a family life. She represents a naggy, bitchy, pearl-clutching suburban person, sure, but she loves him and her entire character is built to try to remind him that his excuses about "doing it for family" are bullshit, and if he really cared he’d stop. She constantly invites him to do normal things, asks him to be a dad, and engages him about being a family man. She pulls him to a normal life, he pulls away. Tug of war.
Cuties has no such thing - no family character pulls at Amy (the protagonist). Her family laments her a couple times, but nobody does anything that challenges her. Nobody says "i love you lets go get fresh food for dinner" and we could perhaps see a loving household filled with warmth, maybe everyone treats Amy like a real person for a night and we see how that impacts her. The only people who show Amy any positive attention are people seeing her dress up and dance around. It’s not a tug of war.
One could argue that was intentional, but then why the sudden reversal? Why would Amy suddenly turn to her family in the last scene instead of just running away? Why did she feel guilt at all for turning her back on these people? And why did they all change their minds and accept her?
Outcomes
Throughout the movie, the girls receive solely positive reactions for their lewdness. Nobody says "hey don’t do that" - there are even public dancing competitions with audiences and judges smiling and nodding along to what they’re seeing these 11-year-old girls do. Every excess is met with approval. The girl who flashes on camera isn’t shown to have negative consequences - far from it, every reaction shot can be summed up as "wow! I can’t believe she did that… that’s cool". The girls get money, friends, and adoration for what they do.
There’s a section near the end where the main character takes a picture of her pussy and posts it in a moment of desperation. She’s about to have her (stolen) phone taken away, and she hates her family, so she does it on an impulse to try and escalate above her peers. It’s a mirror to the first scene, where she posts a duckface selfie and is visibly nervous until someone likes it, where she breathes a sigh of relief. The pussyshot scene is clearly trying to call back to that, how she’s going further trying to get approval.
The aftermath of that is that her friends don’t want to hang out with her - but it’s the epitome of mixed messages. She dances with them at the end anyway, and they only resent her because now everyone wants that from them. Nobody had any negative reaction to it, no school authorities or parents were called about literal child pornography being posted online, everyone is cool with it except her friends, and only because they are uncomfortable doing it.
That could have been a really great climax to the movie, her escalation finally turns into real negative consequences, and everyone turns on her, and she is denied the things she wanted to do. The third act could have shown her realizing that she doesn’t really want to go down this road, because everyone is just treating her like a piece of meat, and her family are the only ones that have any warmth to them. That’s what the filmmakers seem to have wanted to do, but again did so in such a jarring ex-machina way that it made no sense given the prior 80 minutes of screen time.
Ineptitude
The filmmaker’s reach exceeded their grasp, and it’s painfully clear that they just didn’t know what they were doing. Movies that deal with sensitive and heated subjects can be made competently, we need look no further than Requiem for a Dream, or American History X, or even the old Lolita.
They spend a lot of time lingering on shock-value sequences, and not enough time building the characters. This is what detractors home in on - those sequences are lurid and they make up quite a lot of the movie. I get that they’re trying to do this in order to show that it’s not a one-time thing, and that girls really can be lured into this lifestyle if parents don’t pay attention, but you don’t need so many of the same sequences to do it. How many times do we have to see that the girls are having fun, stripper-dancing, being praised for what they’re doing? Presuming they needed to stick to a 90-minute runtime, they could have cut one and used the time to flesh out their plot more.
The only nudity in the film was in-canon a middle-school girl. I understand Netflix has said that no underage nudity exists in the movie, so I’m guessing they’re trying to say that she was 18. But in the film, she’s a middle schooler, she goes to the same school as the 11-year-olds. They get in a schoolyard fight, they compete in the same competitions.
There are the bones of a good movie here, something that could really say something meaningful about growing up in a social media and sexualized age, about the conflict between tradition and modernity, about broken families and what that does to kids, about obligations to others, about kids not knowing when to stop - look there is so much that could be good film material here. And the characters and setting aren’t bad, the broad strokes of the story are actually pretty good - it’s not an unsalvageable mess. As someone who grew up a racial minority, whose family converted religions out of fear, and whose parents divorced when I was the same age as the main character - look i get it. I see what they’re going for. It’s not a bad conceit.
But I can’t defend it, because it’s so poorly done. The net effect is that most of the audience that should be watching it are sickened by it for reasons completely outside what the filmmakers wanted, and the people strongly supporting it are, well, pedophiles. It’s not some moral outrage to make a film that audiences want to jerk off to, I’m not going to pretend like I didn’t freeze-frame a few movies in my youth. But it is more of a problem when you’re making a movie that pedophiles are jerking off to. We could go into the ethics of fictional underage characters or canon-vs-actual actress ages, and that’s a healthy conversation that the movie could have inspired.
But it didn’t. They botched it, and now pedophiles are happy and normal people are upset.
