Hello My Movievaures! I hope you had an amazing week. Today I’m back with a new article on a very controversial movie: Cuties (“Mignonnes” in French). To be completely honest, I wasn’t planning on writing about this movie, but when I saw everything that was happening online I decided I needed to say something about all the backlash and wrong assumptions about it.

Cuties is a French movie, written and directed by Maimouna Doucouré who won the Directing Award at the Sundance Festival Film on January. It was released on theatres in France on August and premiered internationally on September on Netflix. Since then it has been harshly criticised and was the center of a huge controversy, especially in the United States. Even thought it received really good reviews by critics and the general message was a positive one for young girls, the backlash was, and still is huge. Why, are you maybe asking?

I’ll be harsh and direct on this: mainly because of confusion and ignorance. People have been criticising this movie based on a movie poster that Netflix decided to use for Cuties, instead of the original one used in France. Indeed, this poster showing young girls posing as adult dancers was of bad taste and doesn’t represent well the main story of the movie. However, it is also our responsibility as viewers not to base all our opinions on some image we saw on the Internet without even watching the movie itself.

The director has been harassed and very strongly criticised, treated as if she was pushing young girls to be sexual and advocating pedophilia. People who thought this only based on comments online and on the movie poster need to question themselves. How can they believe something so dark and disgusting from a movie they didn’t even watch? This movie tells the story of a kid, torn between a very conservative family and a society sexuality is what we see all day and night on TV, Internet, movies, etc. This is a beautiful story of a young teenager trying to find her place in her world, with strong religious beliefs and also the joys of being a free kid.

There are really three things here that really pissed me of. First of call this tendency of wanting to cancel everything that doesn’t fit people’s beliefs. Movies and shows are also here to move us, t shock us sometimes. To show us that this world is not always nice and politically correct. Maimouna Doucouré wanted to show that for young girls and kids in general, having the “simple” life we all want to believe kids have is not as easy as we think. Anyways, even if a scene can shock you in a movie doesn’t mean that we should cancel the whole movie. Do you imagine how many stories we could have not discover if we did this all the time? So stop all this #cancelnetflix nonsense.

The other issue here is the fact that so many people build their opinions on what they read online without even considering watching the movie or show they already decided was bad. There are more and more people making assumptions on what a movie or show is about based on the poster or the comment of a random person online. I already spoke about this when I wrote about 365 days. Everyone was criticising this movie and at first I was tempted not to watch it only because of what I’ve seen online. However, the most important thing to do before giving your opinion on a piece of art (movies, shows, musicals, drama shows) is to experience it. It was obvious, while reading most of the backlash around Cuties, that many many people didn’t even know what the movie was about. What a shame…

Lastly, what really shocked me is the perversity and darkness of a lot of people. How can you see some girls on a poster and the first thing that popes in you mind is “this is perfect for pedophiles” or “pedophiles will love this”. You really need to question yourself if one of the first things you thought this movie was about was sexualising girls for pleasure and that the actresses were abused to make this movie. You know something that was really fundamentally important in this movie is the fact that kids have no perversity, neither taboos. Adults are the one who bring that to the kids worlds. Therefore, this is something that happened with this movie, where adults were thinking the worst while the whole message was that kids are pure of this darkness.

In short, I believe this movie was the center of a controversy it didn’t deserve. People were criticising a movie they didn’t even watched based on bad publicity. Before giving a bad review on something, at least be sure is your opinion you are writing and not someone else’s. It is really disappointing to see how people can react to something that has actually a good message for today’s young girls.

This is all for today My Movievaures.. I know you are not used to see this type of articles on my blog but I felt I needed to react when I saw how much confusion was around this movie. Let me know your thoughts, even if you don’t agree with me, and feel free also to join me in Instagram at the_movievaures. See you next week!