Down With... Netflix

This week's film is rated 15 in the UK, and is in French, Arabic and Wolof, with English subtitles.

Our next film tells the story of a young French girl growing up in a conservative Muslim household on the outskirts of Paris.

Writer/Director Maïmouna Doucouré drew upon her own experiences growing up in just such an environment, drawing a stark contrast between the ultra-traditionalism of her family life and the loud, unrelenting pressure of life in the age of social media.

It's a powerful (and very honest) film that tells a difficult story about a young girl torn between one world, in which women are little more than sexual objects, and another world. In which women are little more than sexual objects.

The film was very well received at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Directing Award in 2020. The star, Fathia Youssouf, received a César Award for Most Promising Actress.

Then it was picked up by Netflix for worldwide distribution. And all hell broke loose.

That's right, folks. I'm going to screen Cuties.

Reactions were angry, brutal and loud. Conservative pundits urged everyone to cancel their Netflix subscriptions. 

At least three US senators demanded that Netflix be charged with trafficking in Child pornography. A grand jury in Texas did exactly that, filing an indictment against Netflix.

The social media universe went berserk, with conservative Americans competing with each other to accuse Netflix of paedophilia in louder and more extreme terms.

Even political cartoonists felt the need to weigh in on the subject.

Let me be very clear about this. Cuties (or Mignonnes, to use its original French title) does not promote paedophilia. The intensity of the hatred (and the strength of the inquisition that threatened to overwhelm Netflix) had absolutely nothing to do with the film itself.

I cannot stress this strongly enough.

In last week's film, we saw Peter Lorre playing a predatory child murderer, whose persecutors mark him with the letter M.

Nine decades later, the persecution of Cuties came from an entirely different letter of the alphabet.

Starting in 2016 and building to a significant national movement by 2020, the QAnon conspiracy theory revolves around the idea that a secret cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic child molesters are operating a global child sex trafficking ring. This cabal supposedly encompasses most of the American Democratic Party (Hillary Clinton apparently runs the cabal from the basement of a pizza restaurant in Washington DC) along with the overwhelming majority of Hollywood and the "liberal" media. (Click on the link, if you think I'm exaggerating.)

Cuties had the misfortune of appearing on Netflix precisely when the American ultra-right wing were convincing themselves that the liberal establishment were secretly kidnapping children and drinking their blood (and yes, that is a Centuries-old anti-Semitic delusion, re-purposed for the 21st Century).

The fact that Cuties isn't actually an American film is something that was glossed over during all of the hatred and the screaming. Also glossed over is the fact that Cuties is making a very strong and powerful statement against the hyper-sexualisation of young girls that has become so commonplace in modern society.

 

Most of the QAnon-inflected insanity surrounding Cuties obsessed over the dance sequences (which are meant to be uncomfortable; that's one of the major themes of the film) but they completely ignored the other half of the film, which deals with what, precisely, the main character is running away from.

This, more than anything else, exposes the stupidity of the CancelNetflix campaign. 

For a group that claims to be worried about global child trafficking, it's very telling that they completely failed to notice (or care about) the plot thread in Cuties that addresses that very subject.

But then, that half of the film didn't involve scantily-clad girls, so perhaps their attention wandered a bit.

If you are curious to see what all the shouting was really about, we will be screening Cuties at 7.30 on Thursday, the 4th of May, at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.

Trust me.