Cuties

[Dill]

(09-11-2020, 03:03 PM)samhain Wrote: I was a teenager myself when I saw that movie.  It's hard to imagine it being more than 20 years old.  You don't see or hear about it much anymore.  None of it seemed like a big deal when I was watching it back then, but later on (like 5 years ago or so) when I saw it somewhere, it definitely registered as a bit more controversial.  

An aside, there was a song on that movie's soundtrack by a band called Folk Implosion called "Natural One".  It was all over the radio in the mid 90's.  Like everywhere.  Now it seems to have evaporated into thin air on streaming sites.  Really strange.

Well, I watched Cuties last night. I thought it was "ok," not quite as good as Kids.

Of interest to me were--

1. the immigrant's perspective--the parents /family elders of the protagonist were raised to adulthood in Senegalese villages. Suddenly they are supposed to guide children in contemporary Paris, surrounded by scantily clad women and girls and videos of women twerking. This is beyond their means. (To tell the truth, it is beyond mine, as well.) Children spend hours away from home in schools where "fitting in" pulls them away from village codes and Islam, while they are only a cell phone click away from pornographic images. 

2. The preteen perspective--the director helps us view a series of discoveries through the eyes of an 11 year old girl and her friends. One finds a used condom in a park and blows it up like a balloon. Dressed as sexily as she is, she didn't know what a condom was. Her horrified friends take her home and wash out here mouth with soap, rubbing her tongue with a toothbrush. The girls see videos of sexy dances and given a natural interest in dancing, try to imitate what they see, with little sense of how men will really react to them. The world today is SO different from my childhood in the 50s and early 60s, where the coolest luckiest guy in the school was the one whose older brother had some Playboys.

If 1-2 might interest you, then I do recommend the film.

On the negative side--

3. At several points I did not find the protagonists behavior adequately motivated; she steals a fistful of Euros from her mother to buy dance costumes for her friends, and a cell phone from an older cousin; when he discovers she has it and attempts to get it back, she locks herself into the bathroom, takes a picture of her girl parts, and publishes it. For which she receives ill treatment from the boys at school and her girlfriends kick her out of the dance group. The purported cause is her anguish over the father bringing a second wife from Senegal, which is greatly stressing her mother. Still, that's a pretty big jump for an 11 year old Muslim girl. Perhaps that was a crude, immature attempt to use her newly recognized sexual power to affect her social environment? Hard to believe that, however hurt she felt, she could not suspect the negative consequences for the reputation and friendships that meant so much to her.

4. I shouldn't be comparing this to Parasite, the last really good film I saw. But in that film there were so many frames I thought could be just beautiful photographs in their own right because of the care taken in composition and lighting. There weren't really any frames like that in Cuties. There were three or four genuinely interesting scenes though (secretly watching twerk videos during a prayer meeting, the final jump roping) which I thought showed the director's promise.

The climactic moment of the film comes when the girls are competing in a loosely organized local dance contest in a park, and as the girl realizes many in the audience are booing and thumbs downing their performance (while some nasty old men applaud), she freezes, breaks down crying, and runs a way. The stripper like actions the girls performed are indeed shocking, but clumsily done and presented as shocking, not cool or cute. 

As far as the "boycott" over the film. No, I am not down with that. The value of the film is that it focuses on, exposes, an aspect of contemporary first world life that has become normalized with disturbing effects.  The boycott attacks the effects as degenerate, it seems, while ignoring more complex root problems, perhaps in a manner that allows them to continue unquestioned.