Should this film be cancelled? Or, to raise a secondary point: should one see this film before taking a view on such things? It’s still surprising to me, even having lived through so many controversies like this, how many people can’t quite bring themselves to answer “yes” to the second question, or they say that watching the film simply plays into the filth-merchants’ hands, a sorrowing paradox I remember first encountering during the National Theatre run of The Romans in Britain.
Mignonnes, or Cuties – an interesting, flawed debut feature for Netflix from Franco-Senegalese director Maïmouna Doucouré – finds itself at the centre of the nastiest obscenity row since David Cronenberg’s Crash in 1996. This is because of sequences showing a group of naive, excitable 11-year-old girls in a dance group twerking and pouting their way through a grotesquely sexualised adult routine. There has been an ugly and abusive social media storm, dominated by vicious trolls who haven’t seen the film and by mischief-makers jumping at the chance to embarrass those with Netflix connections such as the Obamas.
Yet the film and its accusers turn out to be on the same side: Mignonnes attacks the pornification of girls and young women by social media and society in general; it is about the false promise of liberation in this kind of sexualised display. The offending scenes are gruesomely unwatchable – deliberately so. (A final scene in which the girls present their routine at a dance competition shows people in the audience becoming baffled and disgusted, with one apparently complaining to the judges.)
For the full story, visit TheGuardian.com/Film.
