Cuties - Girl’s in The Digital Age
I finished Cuties (Mignonnes) today and the ending made me cry. It was beautiful. At the very end, after everything that happened, the protagonist Amy walks down her apartment block and joins in jumping rope with some other kids. As she plays, there is a harrowingly beautiful song being sung in Wollof, the language they speak in Senegal, where Amy’s family is from. As she jumps, gleeful, the camera rises up to the sky, and she jumps higher and higher and higher, smiling at us. Simple childhood joy.
I enjoyed the elements of surrealism in this film, paired with an amazing soundtrack. It’s subtle, yet adds a magical almost mystical tone to the film.
The ending made me cry, cry for women, cry for the little girls growing up today, and my own memories that resurfaced.
I grew up with the Internet, in-between mySpace and Instagram, so I was playing games on Facebook, talking to creepy strangers online and messing around with ChatRoulette and Omegle.
The outcry of this film, the over sexualising of young girls and accusations of pedophilia, is exactly the subject matter the director was trying to address. I read in a film critic’s review this phrase: “depiction is not endorsement”. I agree with this completely.
The film is hard to watch, especially in the moments when the group of girls are dancing sexually, twerking and being very suggestive with their bodies. It’s meant to be hard to watch, it’s meant to make us think “Oh shit, 11 year old girls actually do these things”. It made me think of all the things I did as a young person and teenager, thinking I was grown and talking to older kids. Being placed in difficult and dangerous positions. I only think of it now in hindsight, but at that very moment I was trying to prove the world that I was not a child.
I can’t imagine becoming conscious in the age of Instagram and TikTok, this obsession over becoming viral and getting more likes. This self-consciousness over young people’s bodies and appearance at such an early age can only be devastating, and I’m not surprised it may lead to loneliness. That’s who Amy is, she’s a lonely girl who becomes part of this dance friendship group and does mean things, in order to tend to her very basic needs: love and belongingness.
There is another element to this story, where Amy’s father becomes engaged to a second wife and plans to live in their small apartment. I cannot imagine what it must feel to see your mother stripped and humiliated, yet unable to do anything. This is when Amy realises her place as a woman, as a second-class citizen of sorts.
This clash of cultures, between a devout Muslim country and secular France (the wider Western world), in the film shows that no matter where, young women are still fighting to be taken seriously, for ownership over their own bodies and lives. This film shows that we are not finished yet. Women are not empowered.
As I grew up a Muslim, I felt very strict gender roles placed upon my thinking, even though I was never told I couldn’t do anything, the general feeling was there. Yet I don’t think the West has figured it out either. In some interesting conversations I had with good friends a couple days ago, it dawned on me that we have a long way to go to an equal society. We may be able to achieve similar things as men in a public realm, but in our most private and intimate moments such as our relationships with our body, sex and love, we feel we cannot talk about things. That if we feel wrong or uncomfortable, it’s our problem, we’re the fucked up one, when in fact it is our society that still doesn’t take women’s needs seriously.
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