Hacker Cinema
Cuties
Mignonnes
2020 · Film · 96 min
Directed by Maïmouna Doucouré
Amy, an 11-year-old girl, joins a group of dancers named “the cuties” at school, and rapidly grows aware of her burgeoning femininity—upsetting her mother and her values in the process.
4 positive19 negative1 mixed9 neutralfrom 33 commenters
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37 comments on Hacker News
Legalized drug sales and prostitution among adults have _fewer_ victims but that doesn't mean no victims. Legalization is better but it isn't a panacea.
> Such as the movie "Hostel". I never understood why that is OK, why the music industry has pushed gangsta rap etc. for decades, but then something like Cuties out of France which actually critiques the hypersexualization of teenage girls that is taking place, causes an uproar, while the industries doing the hypersexualization are now an accepted part of our liberal "freedom of speech".
AFAIK, everyone involved in the production of "Hostel" was a legal adult.
The girls who were the main characters in "Cuties" were not legal adults, nor anywhere close. I don't even think they were teenagers. From the clip I saw, it wasn't a _critique_ of hypersexualization so much as LITERAL HYPERSEXUALIZATION. There may have been an ironic plot around it saying "this is bad mmm'kay" but that doesn't excuse using children to engage in sexualized behavior.
There's an important conversation to be had about US culture and violence versus sex and language (South Park parodied this well), but "Cuties" is a horrible example because it used actual children to engage in actual sexual objectification.
> Cuties controversy was only about some versions of the poster,
False.
The final performance by the young girls was also discussed. You can find it if you want to watch something disgusting, but it was very sexual and OBVIOUSLY inappropriate for children.
That it's common to see children perform such sexual routines at dance competitions doesn't mean it's appropriate.
The idea that this was Only The Poster was a lie created by a media that thinks child exploitation is OK. Look at the media response to the film "Sound of Freedom", where it's "QAnon adjacent" to oppose child sex trafficking.
https://www.parentstv.org/blog/how-does-a-film-critic-justify-dismissing-criticism-of-a-film-that-sexually-exploits-children
These guys did:
As for Netflix, how can the company possibly reconcile a “coming-of-age” film, and one that centers entirely on 11-year-old girls, with a TV-MA rating? This is not a random decision – it has become corporate practice.
We have frequently called on Netflix to stop hosting content that sexualizes children, such as Baby, Big Mouth, Sex Education, or that glamorizes rape and sexual assault such as 365 Days.
And Netflix habitually markets adult content to young audiences. Parents Television Council research of Netflix programming designated as “Teen” reveals that nearly half was rated either TV-MA (104 titles, or 40.8%) or R (23 titles, or 9.0%); and every single program that carried a TV-14 moniker included harsh profanities.
While we may not always see eye-to-eye with film critics, the criticism of the critics is telling. Cuties is not the first time Netflix has blatantly promoted programming that sexualizes children, but we’re calling on them for this to be the last.
Cuties controversy was only about some versions of the poster, and no one involved saw the movie. No one who watched the movie thought it was super controversial I think.
Well, if actual harm to people and children is what we want to reduce, then perhaps decriminalizing an innocuous (as in no victims) form of it may actually reduce the harm to actual people.
Just like the cases for decriminalizing prostitution and drugs: https://time.com/longform/portugal-drug-use-decriminalization/
And btw -- it's not just about thoughtcrime, it's a major double standard, seems to me. In the West it's perfectly normal for Hollywood to put out "Rated R" horror movies that feature gore and torture, ripping off limbs, mass murders, etc. Such as the movie "Hostel". I never understood why that is OK, why the music industry has pushed gangsta rap etc. for decades, but then something like Cuties out of France which actually critiques the hypersexualization of teenage girls that is taking place, causes an uproar, while the industries doing the hypersexualization are now an accepted part of our liberal "freedom of speech".
There are reasons child pornography is bad and loli shares some (but by no means all) of the reasons. Just because loli isn't as bad as 'normal' child pornography doesn't mean that it's not still bad.
Sexualisation of minors is not a good thing, and taking a stance against it is a perfectly reasonable action. For example - Netflix's "Cuties" film should never have been made, except that it did at least draw some attention to the real life pageants that are themselves a problem.
Disney famously courted Chinese audiences for everything. One big example was them removing Finn from the movie posters, simply for being black. That wouldn't fly over there. Then they turned around and cried about diversity and inclusion and they tried their insane 'latinX' garbage.
Netlfix wokeness is legendary, their mandates are insane.
It was all pandering from the beginning.
I watched the BET awards the other night and was absolutely disgusted. Not one black owned business got air time for commercials- was all P&G, google, amazon commercials. All going on about what they do for the black community.
Like the pride month commercials, I'm just so sick of the bullshit pandering, but I'm also tired of people believing it.
We used to call companies out for this shit. Everything is metrics and visuals, all they care about is money. The rest is bullshit to help them make more of it.
Edit to add re:netflix- they recently dropped a lot of' woke' content. Anti-racist baby, the cartoon by Megan Markel, etc- heads and shows have been rolling. Someone coined the term 'pivot to profit'. Ricky Gervais' new special Supernature, meanwhile, was like their most watched special this year,and they backed Dave Chappelle.
I think now that they have to batton down the hatches the pandering wokeness was the first thing overboard.
Also friendly reminder Netflix greenlit 'Cuties'.
Maybe the "Cuties debacle" refers to the promotional imagery put out by Netflix with regards to the film. See here [0] a side-by-side comparison of the original poster for the film and the Netflix poster for the film.
People who only saw the Netflix poster could have a very different view of the movie and some might even refuse to watch the film.
[0] https://cdn.hobbyconsolas.com/sites/navi.axelspringer.es/public/styles/480/public/media/image/2020/08/posteres-pelicula-cuties-2037169.jpg
I've heard it quipped that there's no such thing as anti-war movie. No matter how searing the criticism, no matter how horrifying the violence: war simply looks good on the screen, and the spikes of adrenaline we get during a war film excite us. The same could be said of films with any form of taboo sexuality, even when done in the spirit of satire or social criticism.
> I'm sure there are some snuff films with interesting character development too.
The criticism is absolutely worth considering, regarding the ethics of production. But it's worth contrasting like-with-like (not to shut down the argument, but to try to define the boundaries):
- Was the production of "The Professional" or "Taxi Driver" ethical? Both films sexualized young girls; and in the former case, Natalie Portman found the experience (particular the response and aftermath) moderately traumatic, and explicitly avoided roles with any sexuality until her late twenties.
- Was Kubrick's directorial process ethical, particularly in regard to The Shining, where he was blatantly abusive to Shelley Duvall (charitably, to elicit the best performance)? If that instance is over the line, exactly how hard are directors allowed to be on actors, and how much explicit prior consent should be necessary for "method directing"?
- To what extent is child labor in film-making ethical to begin with? We've converged on 14 as the minimum age for W-2 employment (notwithstanding family businesses, kids with apps, kids with YouTube channels, and "off-books" tasks for pocket money). If hiring a kid for a movie is fine, why can't that same kid sweep floors at a gas station? We could say "because there's no other way to make realistic movies"; but that's not that different from "there's no other way to tell a story about coming-of-age in a hyper-sexualized world".
- To what extent should such limitations be a product of individual ethical choices, vs social norms / taboos, vs "market ethics" (boycotts), vs public law and policy (either in the sense of labor laws, or indecency constraints on expression)?
Again, not saying that criticizing the production of Cuties isn't valid, or appealing to the status quo, and definitely not making some backdoor argument against child labor laws or age-of-consent; just that these questions are larger in scope, and don't have obvious answers.
This post is getting downvoted, but it does bring up an interesting point. The idea of judging a book by it's cover seems to be universally criticized. But especially with movie trailers, it can be unambiguously clear how the movie is being sold and what the intent is. I haven't seen Cuties or its trailer, so I'm not speaking specifically about it. But I would say trailers say quite a bit more about a movie than covers say about books. OP said that the movie was actually a criticism of child sexualization. If that's the case (which it may or may not be) and the trailer would generally be considered as instead selling child sexualization (which it may or may not), then there's something missing unless the trailer is being ironic, which seems unlikely given that the topic doesn't seem like a very appropriate subject for irony.
Sidebar, but the "Cuties debacle" is nothing more than a moral panic. Cuties is a great movie about an immigrant kid struggling to cope with a broken home by escaping her parents and becoming a "normal French girl." She doesn't know how to fit in so she tries to gain acceptance with her non-immigrant school-friends by hyper-sexualizing herself. The story a searing criticism of the sexualization of children, not a celebration it. The dancing scene that everyone complains about is deliberately constructed to disgust the viewer, not to titillate them: you're meant to see it as the protagonist's lowest point, when they realize that they are pretending to be someone they're not in a bid to escape her parents' marital trauma. People got upset about it without seeing the movie. It's a great movie.
I respectfully disagree. I haven't seen cuties, but I just watched the trailer. The movie may be a good thoughtful coming of age movie, but the trailer (at least in my opinion) did not characterize that at all. If I watch a trailer and it seems to indicate a movie that's about the sexualization of very young girls, I think it's perfectly fine for me to cancel my subscription without watching the movie. You may disagree with that sentiment, and that's fine, but I think that many people who did not watch the movie had seen the trailer and had a similar reaction that I just had.
I actually think that Cuties was widely mischaracterised as a movie by people who didn't watch it and just reacted to what they thought the content of the movie was.
It's actually a good thoughtful coming of age movie that talks about important topics and actually criticises the culture of hypersexualisation of young girls.
I am virtually certain you have not watched Mignonnes. It is really quite good, and treats its subject matter with care. You have fallen for propaganda. Just watch it. It isn't long and I promise you won't wind up scarred for life. If you hate it, at least you will have come to that decision yourself.
Until you watch the film, I couldn't possibly care what you have to say about it.
I cancelled my account directly because of Cuties. I dont live alone and do not want anyone in my household watching CP disguised as an art house film. I know of at least 1 other person who have done the same.
Cuties isn't a children's film, it's rated MA (for mature audiences).
There is no dispute that Netflix has woke programming, or heck many other kinds of programming and no sensible person would claim otherwise. What is being asked is which programs for children/kids are you arguing is politically motivated?
The only examples anyone has been able to produce are children shows that have homosexual characters in them. I am going to assume the best of intentions here, but it's very hard not to find it appalling that many people would think that a show that has some gay characters in it is making a political statement or has a political agenda.
I didn't suggest it was "hurting" children however I do believe it hurts the overall quality of the programming.
One example that probably flirts the line with hurting children was Netflix's Cuties.
"Netflix is also the streaming service behind "Cuties," a wildly controversial French film that tells the coming-of-age story of an 11-year-old girl as she discovers her maturing self, all while looking for acceptance in her religious family and group of young dancers she hopes to befriend"
If you want examples of pardon the term but I guess "woke" programming, this list is pretty extensive on Netflix. You can do a quick google search yourself to see lots of examples here.
My personal take (as someone who is left leaning) is when these messages are bombarded into programming it often feels forced.. even perhaps propagandized. This level of inauthenticity hurts the overall artistic and entertainment value of the programming (just my two cents).
Netflix is churning out an insane amount of content that is background noise at best and barely watchable at worst.
They also lost a lot of face defending “Cuties” - which was basically kiddie porn disguised as an art house film.
The budget of the film Cuties was under $1M, maybe a small bit more with Netflix's marketing involvement after the initial release (Netflix bought the rights to a worldwide release outside of France). Spotify just directly wiped tens of millions of dollars off their service and likely suffered more long-term lost subscriptions since people have already switched to YT Music or Apple Music; anyone that dropped Netflix had probably resubscribed by the time Squid Game was released.
I watch the special, it definitely was not hateful. The end was not as funny as I expected.
I don't recall staff walking out over the Cuties movie. That definitely was pushing the line.
Canceled Netflix when I read about the content of the Cuties movie. The 3 other people who used my Netflix account were a bit bummed, but nobody paid for Netflix for themselves after I canceled. Plex + Sonarr/Radarr & a VPN is the way to go.
This may be true. It wouldn't surprise me if Parler said "no" when asked to take them down, but I didn't see that even in Amazon's court filing.
However, I don't think Amazon should interfere in customers' businesses and harm the relationship between customers and third parties (the users). What if Amazon had said, "Netflix, we find the Cuties movie offensive. We have shut you off and will delete all of your data within 24 hours."
I'm not sure how it affects your argument, but in the interest of accuracy (and presuming I haven't missed hearing about another controversial documentary) I'll mention that "Cuties" is not a documentary, but a fictional feature film. I haven't seen either.
I've seen "Cuties" without prior knowledge of the controversy. It is a good movie that actually denounces indoctrination (moral/religious or consumerist/sexual) of young girls. It is also a very French movie, which codes may not be familiar to American public. Some scenes are ambiguous, reflecting both superficial joy and ethical uneasiness. As part of the whole story they balance out but taken out of context these images will look plain wrong; Netflix mistake was to use those scenes as part the movie's trailer.
What people say and what people do are not the same thing. Society, when given a recent choice, declared outrage for the children then promptly chose the institution. Any other business with a child abuse record the length of the Catholic church’s would be publicly shunned, closed down, and its assets sold off to compensate its many, many victims. And yet, it’s as strong as ever; a bastion of conservative establishment “do as I say not as I do”.
Look, this is not hard to understand: the increasingly fascistic US Right and its Qanon sturmtrupplers are using their “deep state cannibal pedophiles” narrative (amend as appropriate) as a modern-day blood libel in which to paint all their enemies. Mignonnes is simply one more convenient hook upon which to hang the greater attack. To fixate on the film is just one more layer of misdirection, to keep people angry, active, and blind to the big picture. You cannot understand anything until you understand that.
There is nothing innately anti-pedophile abould US Conservative culture; if anything, it’s proved one of the great hiding places for abusers (51st Speaker of the House, anyone?), precisely because it controls what gets said publicly and what is kept private, cultivating and misdirecting popular rage onto its political enemies, and edging ever closer to repeating the great atrocities of history, from the blood libel-stoked slaughters of first European Jews by Catholics, then of those Catholics by the new Protestants, through to the ethnic executions of the Bosnian war and the wholesale genocide of Rwanda, and everything inbetween.
Now I consider myself European despite being stuck here on reactionary backwards Airstrip One. My granddaddy was Antifa back in Africa and Italy. I also know firsthand how much damage one can do just by choosing a pleasing lie over a painful truth. I have few illusions about how bad things can get, and all it take to get it underway is for enough people to buy into a Big Lie to justify everything that comes next. I have the limitations but also the benefits of an outside perspective on what’s happening in the US right now, and I’m legit worried for the future of our whole damn planet as a large chunk of America charges proudly towards a Russia-like one-party state.
If you don’t wish to repeat humanity’s bloody history (which I can assure you won’t spare the children from anyone else) then you really need to start paying attention to who is spinning the popular narratives and to what goal. Starting in a mirror—because if you can’t be brutally, rigorously honest with yourself about your own understanding and motives, then what makes you think you can defend yourself from others’ deceptions any better?
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/10/watching-netflixs-cuties-survivor-pedophilia/616731/
https://www.adl.org/education/resources/glossary-terms/blood-libel
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-26875506
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5eFubO_iLM
--
“Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches.” – William Pannapacker
> Isn't this textbook fair use?
Debatable. A good faith case can be made that its not.
> Nothing about these clips being shared on Twitter replaces the viewing experience of Cuties.
"Replacing the viewing experience" isn't necessary to be outside of fair use, and the work at issue is probably the trailer itself, not Cuties. Which matters a lot when you look at the "amount and substantiality" prong of fair use analysis.
> The tweets are definitely transformative and provide a critique of the film.
Sure, I don't think anyone would argue that the purpose prong of fair use is in dispute.
> Doesn't copyright law explicitly permit this use of copyrighted works?
There is very little explicit about the "fair use" defense; even how the four prongs of the test interact isn't explicit.
I had it explained to me thusly:
Action movies have a lot of murders. Nobody actually died.
Mystery movies have a lot of liars. Nobody was actually deceived.
Cuties has a lot of child sexualization. Children were actually sexualized.
What we're quibbling over now is if the message of the film justifies it - and my answer would be no, there is no message conceivable that would do so.
I guess you have never seen the film Pretty Baby with Brooke Shields. Cuties is harmless compared to it.
> Legally the company is allowed to do this of course, as they own the rights.
Isn't this textbook fair use? Nothing about these clips being shared on Twitter replaces the viewing experience of Cuties. The tweets are definitely transformative and provide a critique of the film. Doesn't copyright law explicitly permit this use of copyrighted works?
Feel free to update the list with ratings from any aggregator you prefer.
Also, when you say LOU2, do you mean The Last of Us II? I'd like to point out that Rotten Tomatoes is a TV/film ratings website and so does not have a rating for that video game. As such, if that is what you meant by LOU2, then you clearly have no idea what you are talking about.
RT is also an aggregator of reviews, so any rating on RT of a film like Cuties is not "RT's rating", but rather a score calculated from professional TV/film critics. If you think most critics are bad at doing their job then fair enough, but this entire subthread was about a claim that Netflix has terrible programming compared to "Hollywood". Not sure who you think is better equipped to judge such things besides professional critics, except of course your estimable self.
Right wing district attorneys are currently suing Netflix over Cuties, in a throwback to early-90s moral outrage arguments by people who have not actually watched a film and understood anything about it: https://www.cinemablend.com/news/2556282/netflixs-cuties-backlash-has-extended-to-a-lawsuit
People have just gotten so used to conservative calls for censorship that they escape all notice.
It's a movie rated "mature" featuring sexualized depictions of 11 year old girls. 11 year olds (the only even remotely "appropriate" audience for the film) can't legally watch it. It's a film filmed by pedophiles for pedophiles, and its ratings reflect that. Fun fact: 4chan, which lets you post swastikas, porn, and gore all day long _censors_ Cuties screenshots, since it does not allow child porn.
A tangent about Cuties, but felt like airing my thoughts on this somewhere.
The outrage over Cuties is some of the weirdest situations of political/cultural toxoplasma I've seen.
The movie has nothing that's considered abnormal to what pre-teens and teens are exposed and engage in modern western culture. Girls are exposed to the dances/ect that sexualize them everywhere from social media platforms (tiktok, ect) and in person (regular middle school/high school stuff). The dances in cuties are very meh in by those measurements.
The movie tries to take a look at this, "norm," and displays something that's somewhat normal in a movie format. It's especially weird that the movie got it's backlash from conservatives b/c the message is arguably somewhat conservative.
The story is a girl coming from a extremely conservative background embracing the supposedly pro-women modern liberal western culture. By showing this the character and the viewers question if modern western cultural attitudes to women and their sexualization is actually better than the treatment of women in conservative cultures.
SPOILERS: It ends with the character embracing some sort of middle path that leaves you asking if that's even possible.
Like if you believe in the backlash against Cuties and the sexualization of the kids in modern society, that backlash should be more directed a backlash against places like tiktok/ect that encourage pre-teens/teens to copy/perform sexualized dances for money/street cred.
> For me, I know that at least the film is a piece of fiction with strong influences from reality — but pageants and kids twerking in mini skirts is a real thing. You can’t blame Cuties for existing.
This is a pretty thin defense. Honestly, child beauty pageants should probably end, too; I can think of no more attractive a venue for a pedophile to gravitate towards, and I can think of no stronger way to convince a young girl that her only value is her appearance. It's basically objectification practice sessions.
The movie is a problem because it uses the veneer of a story to normalize the distribution of material featuring sexualized children. The plot or moral of the story don't matter, because the subsection of the audience that most good parents are worried about are just going to fast forward that anyway, aren't they?
Meanwhile, we have yet another divide in the unending culture war, this time forcing you to be either on the side of people who defend the distribution of materials that sexualize children, or to be on the side of the so-called Evil Right Wingers who worry that this is yet another piece in a strategy to normalize pedophilia (as pedosexuality) over the course of a generation or so. It's odd that you can't just be a normal person who thinks it's gross and borderline abusive to have 11-year-old girls twerking on the TV.
They also banned all images from the Netflix film "Cuties"
https://www.newsweek.com/4chan-bans-images-netflix-film-cuties-1526545
“ FB and most sites which have a bias against, say conspiracy theories, regularly find themselves against conservative forces which for, whatever reason, have a willingness to expound and accept conspiracy theories.”
lol - Conspiricy is hardly a “conservative” issue. Heck just look at the now thoroughly debunked Russian collusion hoax.
Pizzagate? Laughed out and mocked but over time more and more evidence of perversion among elites surfaces. The most recent being “Cuties”, the “award winning” movie about twerking (their word, not mine) 11 year olds Netflix just started to promote. That award, BTW was from Sundance - where one of the co-founders was convicted and faces six years to life for.... pedophilia.
Yup - all just conspiracies. Which is the fun of conspiracies - they can provide great cover if deployed appropriately.
Also in the Guardian.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/aug/21/cuties-netflix-film-fury
The irony being that the first time director is a black woman.
Threatening the ability to be subtle in art. Not a new thing - see Chris Morris 'Paedogeddon' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9frVTgoKSI
Hope folks wake up to the manipulation going on here fairly sharpish.