On Aug. 18, Netflix accidentally fired the first shot in what may be the single dumbest battle of the culture wars, this one over “Cuties,” Maïmouna Doucouré’s sweet-spirited French coming-of-age drama about Amy, an 11-year-old Muslim girl in Paris looking for friendship among the competitive dancers in her class at school.
Netflix briefly promoted the film, a Sundance directing prize winner, with a digital “poster” that made it look a bit like a horrible American reality TV series — the notorious "Dance Moms," perhaps, which ran for eight seasons on Lifetime, or Netflix's own "Dancing Queen," or "Bring It," which had five seasons on Lifetime, or its companion show "Step It Up," which got only one season, all of which came and went without protracted public objection. Within hours of that first trailer for “Cuties,” the pedophile-obsessed American right, driven by QAnon, had a new target.
It’s legitimately upsetting to see this movie so cynically hijacked. It’s a very witty indie film — impeccably framed and shot — about the tug-of-war between Amy’s Sengalese Muslim heritage (which is brutally subjugating her mother) and her new French friends’ brazenness as they compete with older girls in dance competitions where they borrow choreography from sexy American music videos.
It is, annoyingly, important to state plainly that “Cuties” does not portray child abuse, it does not glorify or countenance pedophilia in any way, and it does not “sexualize” its characters — which is, to put it plainly, a favorite description of people so disturbed by their own reaction to a piece of art that they have to quickly plant the blame for that reaction on the artist before anyone notices. Doucouré’s movie is about platonic relationships between women and girls; there is no sexuality to be had anywhere in this movie, which makes the outrage over it seem all the more extraterrestrial.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/criticism-netflix-s-cuties-isn-t-about-mov...