‘Cuties’ Is Beautifully, and Brutally, Honest About Girlhood

The movie illuminates how social media encourages girls to perform wildly exaggerated versions of womanhood

‘Cuties.’ Photo courtesy of Netflix

Probably the most frequently cited observation about pornography is former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous line about “knowing it when you see it.” But what happens when you don’t see it? Specifically, what happens when you refuse on principle to look at an image you’re certain is pornography, even when the creator of that image has clearly stated it was not intended to be? A few decades ago, you would have been dismissed as unsophisticated prude. Today, you get the backing of the highly sophisticated algorithms of Twitter, which never met a hysteria it couldn’t profit from.

This is the moralistic catch-22 that has befallen a French Senegalese film called Cuties (Mignonnes in its original French), which deals with the way young girls mimic the sexually provocative images they see on social media, often without having any idea what they’re actually conveying. The directorial debut of Mäimouna Doucouré, who also wrote the screenplay, the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and won the directing award in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition. On September 9, it was made available for streaming on Netflix…