Cuties

I read an article recently about the Netflix show, Cuties. It’s outraged some people because it shows a team of 11 year old girls twerking.

It’s a testament to feminists, and those who have long wished to abandon any sort of modesty for girls, that this show didn’t shock me.

But there was a movie beyond the twerking, and one with themes that border on the politically incorrect. For instance, the main black girl, Amy, comes from an Islamic family who lives in France. I don’t think the word “Islam” is ever used but it’s obvious they are Muslims.

Conflict comes to the family from the absent father who is in Tunis (or somewhere like that) and has taken another bride. The mother is crushed but decides to swallow her pride and accept this.

The long and the short of it is that you’re not seeing a whitewashed view of Islam by any means. Its creepiness and oppression of women are the backdrop for why young Amy would want to ditch the burqa and twerk instead.

Much of the film then lapses into something that otherwise could (minus the twerking) be standard Disney fare. A bunch of young girls in a clique giggle and fight and all around act like horrible little girls. They hope to win a dance competition. Etc. Etc.

It’s quite obvious from the beginning that feminism trumps Islam in this one, which is sort of politically incorrect depending upon how you stack the chits. But then these girls are so wild and irresponsible that the “you go girl” feminism that they are obviously portraying is shown to be self-evidently self-destructive. Amy eventually blows up her life and this ends with her returning to the Islamic fold, more or less. The end.

So that’s the essence of the movie. You actually have a core of a good movie here, a sort of “coming of age” thing for a young girl who definitely would rather dance and have fun that be a slave to a scumbag Islamic man. But thrown in with an almost psychedelic compulsion is the twerking. It takes such center stage, it’s impossible for this film to achieve appropriate meaning or depth.

But we’ve seen this before. You can imagine some sincere (for them) filmmakers behind the scenes trying to write something meaningful. But they can’t ditch their sort of scumbag perspective and thus while trying to bake a cake, they throw hot-sauce in it and ruin the pastry.

That’s how this movie feels. Yes, having a group of 11-year-olds twerk is obnoxious, at the very least. But the movie is a victim of it own inability to do anything but move around the dominos of Bad & Stupid Things, trading one for the other, and never really coming to much of a conclusion about anything. This is what you’d expect from filmmakers with a flimsy moral foundation to begin with.