TL;DR Cuties is rated the equivalent of “G” in France, it was Netflix’s choice to rate it TV-MA on their platform, please stop undermining the film with that argument.
Tweet thread from @sochekochegoche:
I’m glad that most well-meaning people have caught up with the current understanding of what happened with Netflix’s mishandling of Maïmouna Doucouré’s #Cuties movie but it seems the TV-MA rating *Netflix* applied is still being blamed on Doucouré.
The short answer to “how do you have a children’s coming of age story rated for mature audiences?” is “you botch the marketing so badly that an entire country without access to the movie is enraged and then you fix it by slapping a mature rating on it”, where you = Netflix.
Maïmouna Doucouré’s Cuties, which was released in France as Mignonnes, has the lowest clearance rating provided by the French Cinematographic Industry Code: U/TP or “tous publics”, which means it is approved for all audiences in France. (Link)
This might be confusing to American movie-goers who are used to U meaning Unrated/Uncut, which is generally a warning by the MPAA that the content may not be suitable for all audiences, the exact reverse of what it means in the French classification. (Link)
I switched my VPN to France (Paris) and searched for the movie to find local showings, the results were consistent and for sake of screenshots I’m using Allociné which seems comparable to Fandango in that they catalog films and showings in one place.
At one theater, Mignonnes is shown directly next to The Rental, a US thriller. You can see “The Rental” has “Interdit - 12 ans” before it’s description because The Rental is restricted to children over 12. Mignonnes has no restriction! Compare to Scooby! and Enrage.
Netflix says on their own support pages that the ratings for the content on their site can be chosen by Netflix OR a local standard, with no information given on specifically how those calls are made. (Link)
Even though Netflix France has sparser categories, the gap between having no restriction in France to being rated in the adult categories on Netflix in the US makes no sense when the content is exactly the same as what is being shown in theaters in France.
It’s unreasonable to continue to blame Maïmouna Doucouré for this series of bad decisions that seem to be solely the fault of @netflix for leaning into shock marketing because none of the criticisms presently lie with the original imagery, descriptions, and rating of the film.
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