Who Are We Producing These Images For? An Anti-Racist Feminist Critique of Cuties

By Natalya Vince

Maïmouna Doucouré’s first feature-length film Mignonnes (Cuties in English) attracted relatively little attention when it was released in French cinemas in August 2020, having won the World Cinema Dramatic Competition section of the Sundance festival. Since being released internationally on Netflix on 9 September, it has provoked a Twitter storm. The main focus has been on the hypersexualised dance routines of the 11-year-old Franco-Senegalese protagonist, Amy, and her crew. For its critics, the film is abusive and exploitative, mainstreaming and making socially acceptable sexualised imagery of pre-teen girls to titillate paedophiles. For its defenders, the film is misunderstood and should instead be seen as a right-of-passage movie which critiques social media and wider society’s pornification of girls and women, and which centres the life of a young, Black, Muslim girl whose stories are rarely seen on screen.

I wrote the following text immediately after watching the film, it was written quickly in the heat of the moment and draws on both academic research and personal recollections. In the context of a long history of colonial and post-colonial powers such as France objectifying the bodies of Black, Arab and Asian women to exploit them sexually and instrumentalise them politically (notably to make claims about supposed European “civilisational superiority”), a feminist critique of this film has to also be an anti-racist critique. The sexual and racial politics of this film are intimately entwined. The fact that it is a young, Franco-Senegalese female director who has made a film which reproduces stereotypical representations of Black and Muslim women and girls in France makes it even more important to underline that Mignonnes is the product of something much bigger than its director. That is to say, it is the product of a structurally racist and sexist French film industry which ultimately decides what kind of stories get out there and which don’t see the light of day and which has an unenviable track record in putting women and girls in exploitative situations on set. Mignonnes is a deeply reactionary film, whose uncritical hypersexualised representation of 11-year-old girls is the dangerous but logical result of a half-digested message about individual empowerment and agency which fails to engage in structural power imbalances of age, sex, race and class.

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So I watched Mignonnes/Cuties.

The set-up is that favourite old trope of French films about France’s Black/ Arab/ Muslim population: “tradition” (embodied by the absent polygamous Senegalese father/ Islam/ mean conservative religious auntie) vs “modernity” (represented by daughter Amy’s skimpy clothes and sexualised dancing). You can of course start with a cliché in order to break it down. This film doesn’t. “Freedom” comes exclusively from taking your clothes off and writhing around semi naked which YAY because you are in FRANCE the country of LIBERTY, EQUALITY and FRATERNITY you can do. Don’t forget you are FREE even though you live in overcrowded housing with queues for the collective washing machines. If ever you forget in this film that France equals freedom, the language choices in the dialogue will remind you. This is a really common representation in French cinema as if it is impossible to talk about sex or defend yourself as a woman in Arabic or Wolof. So, when the downtrodden mother finally stands up to mean conservative religious auntie to defend her daughter, she doesn’t do it in their shared mother tongue which they’ve spoken to each other in for the rest of the film, she does it in FRENCH. Because everyone knows when you’re really angry you shout in your second language. Not. Take that, the patriarchy, dans ta gueule.

Pitching the polygamous Black Muslim father as the impetus for Amy’s rebellion also gives the film an air of Nicolas Sarkozy circa 2005, when the right-wing Minister of the Interior blamed “immigrant polygamy” for social breakdown and street rioting. As president 2007-2012, he even toyed with the idea of stripping polygamous immigrant men of their French nationality, because of course no French president has ever had, like, a secret second family, looking at you François Mitterrand). Although criticism of critique of the film has been framed by some “progressives” as right-wing pearl clutching (and I’m sure there are plenty of them amongst the critics, just as there are plenty of right-wingers enjoying the film), by churning out these tired old stereotypes about sex, race, language and religion, Mignonnes is in fact is a deeply reactionary film.

Of course, what stops this being your bog-standard burka vs décolleté film is the fact that the girls in the film are 11 years old. This, of course, is where there has been the controversy – the VERY sexualised dance routines of 11-year-old girls as they enter a dance competition. There were two things I thought about before beginning to watch this film:

1) when we were a bit younger than the girls in the film (i.e. end of primary school) the two songs we danced to all the time were Salt-n-Pepa’s Let’s Talk about Sex and Push It. We had really no idea about sex and probably thought Push It was about opening a door. The only dance move I can remember from the time was the running man, but there were no doubt some moves which would be considered sexualised

2) A couple of years later – around about the same age as the girls in Mignonnes, i.e. 11 – all us girls would realise very quickly and very violently that we were seen as legitimate sexual objects by large numbers of adult men. One afternoon me and a friend decided to walk around our local streets and count the number of times men tried to accost us (stopping us in the street, shouting out comments, beeping their car horns at us). In the space of 45 minutes we got to 15 examples. That’s one creepy grown-ass man making a sexual advance to two 12/13 year-old girls in their school uniform every three minutes. We then had to learn the many techniques every girl and woman has to learn to say no to men without actually saying no explicitly in case their wounded ego made them aggressive. The classic one was of course to tell the predator that you had a boyfriend (because only being another man’s possession was an acceptable excuse for not being available to be his). I can’t remember most examples because they were so frequent, but on one occasion I decided to ignore a man who accosted my teenage self with the line “Give me your number, bitch, before I don’t want it no more” and ended up having to run away from him and hide in Dalston KFC toilets as he chased me down the road. I should add too that the secret “older boyfriend” was also commonplace – i.e. a 24-year-old man and a 14-year-old girl. This would today be recognised as child sexual exploitation and probably was recognised as such at the time. In many ways, we were very much like the girls in the film – laughing, joking, strategising and subverting parental and societal rules – but also at the same time, we were aware that our margins of manoeuvre were small, we didn’t get to decide where the power lines were drawn and the consequences of stepping outside them would always be worse for us.

All that is a big long preamble to say that I did wonder if the film might be able to tell a story of how girls who are only just beginning to understand their own sexuality try to navigate the ways in which they are aggressively sexualised by a deeply misogynistic and patriarchal society. The answer is a big fat NO. The point of view of this film is a total mess. On occasion, it seems to try to film from the perspective of the girls themselves (for example, when Amy curiously examines the different backsides of women in her block of flats in the stairwell which is quite funny, or her semi-responsible relationship with her little brother) but when the girls are dancing, it is all crotch shots, close ups on floor humping and staring-into-the-camera suggestive finger licking. That 11 year olds dance like that I have no doubt – like we did in 1990s, they see it, they copy it (although Salt-n-Pepa et al. are remarkably fully clothed and not sexualised compared to say, Cardi B, today). But why would you film it like that? What point are you trying to make? Whose benefit is this for? It is clear from the awkward social interactions which these girls have with boys of their own age that they have no sexual experience. So who is really able to read and decode these sexual signs? Not pre-teen girls that’s for sure.

And that is why watching the film is such an uncomfortable experience: you recognise the naivety of the kids doing these moves and at the same time you know how it will be read by adults, or rather by MEN. Maïmouna Doucouré has said that she sought to critique the sexualisation of children. This does not come across AT ALL. In fact, apart from the absent polygamous father, all the male characters in the film are benign men who awkwardly repel the girls’ sexual advances. The security guard at the laser arcade tries to call the girls’ parents and then desperately shoves them out the door when they falsely accuse him of sexual assault. The older cousin whose phone Amy steals finds himself accidentally the owner of what would be classed as images of child sexual abuse when Amy takes a picture of her genitals with the phone camera before returning the device. The girls desperately try to persuade a group of 15/16 year old boys that they are older than they are, which is met by the boys responsibly declining their advances, saying that they are too young. It is these parts of the scenario which set the tone for how we read the dancing: under some bullshit guise of empowerment and agency, these 11 year old girls are presented as sexual predators. This is one fucked up message. Where are the creepy old blokes curb crawling in this film? Where are the cat calls? Where are the groomers? Where are the flashers? Where are the boys for whom enthusiastic consent is an optional extra? The hypersexualisation is presented as something entirely done by these girls and not to them and there are NO negative consequences shown, apart from mean conservative religious auntie who tells Amy that she is dressed like a prostitute (and auntie’s opinion doesn’t matter anyway as she embodies mean, conservative, religious “tradition”).

I watched the film all the way to the end of the credits as I was interested to see which organisations had financed the film. In doing so I discovered that the film had one child psychiatrist working on it and two dog handlers. I can’t remember there being any dogs in the film but thought it interesting that the well-being of dogs merited twice as many people as the child actors performing this script. Amy is played by Fatiha Youssouf who comes across as a great young actor. I hope she and her fellow actors will be OK. There is of course a long history of young women being exploited on film sets and not necessarily able to talk about it, or even fully recognise it, at the time (Léa Seydoux, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Maria Schneider…).

This film got a LOT of French state support. Avance sur recette from the National Centre for Cinematography (basically pre-funding based on anticipated ticket sales), Fonds images de la diversité (targetted funding to promote diversity), Commissaire général à l’égalité des territoires (funding for more socio-economically deprived areas of France), Aide au développement (more funding for film development), Ile de France regional funding..... part of the explanation for this generous funding is what I opened with: the French state and by extension state-funded French cultural organisations LOVE the “tradition” vs “modernity” dichotomy whereby Black and Arab characters and especially Black and Arab MUSLIM WOMEN are emancipated by becoming French which usually is embodied by taking their clothes off. This is the kind of film which will get funding. It very difficult for Black or Arab directors in France to get funding for any film that doesn’t fit such favoured themes (Oppressed women! Liberated women! Terrorism! Repressed sexuality! Generational conflict!). No Black or Arab director ever has the indulgence getting funding for one of those long boring films of French people arguing over dinner for two hours… unless they are arguing about couscous vs choucroute or some such dull tradition vs modernity cliché.

Maïmouna Doucouré says that she drew on her own lived experiences when writing the script. Without denying her own ownership of – and responsibility for – the script and its cinematography, as for many Black and Arab directors, it is likely that in the course of obtaining funding, participating in writing workshops, working with producers, editors and cinematographers etc, her ideas and dialogues will have been (re)packaged and made readable for a predominately white French cinema-going audience. This explains the scene when Amy sheds her baggy clothes and heads back to school in a crop top and skin tight leather-look leggings in EXACTLY THE SAME SCENE as when Olivia Newton John goes back to high school with her new sexy look in Grease. Is this 1978 American film really a cultural reference for an 11-year-old Franco-Senegalese girl who listens to mainstream contemporary pop/hip hop in Paris? Or is this intertextuality a clin d’œil to the white 50-year olds in the cinema?

Remember this film got funding to PROMOTE DIVERSITY and as part of a strategy to REDRESS INEQUALITIES in socio-economically deprived areas. But it’s not good enough to have a Black female director or majority Black cast or film in poor suburbs. Real “diversity” is telling stories that are not designed to conform to and reinforce the assumptions and stereotypes which white audiences and white – mostly male – film critics have of what it’s like to be young, female, Black and Muslim. Criticising this film isn’t about hating on a Black, female film director, of whom there are far too few – it’s about recognising that the film she made is the product of a structurally racist and sexist film industry.

In short, for me, this film is a familiar product of the French film industry which has reluctantly begun to wave the banner of “diversity” whilst churning out the same old clichéd stories about “others”. The only reason it has got attention is because of its uncritical hypersexualised representation of 11 year old girls. This is the dangerous but logical result of a half-digested message about individual empowerment and agency which fails to engage in structural power imbalances of age, sex, race and class.

Natalya Vince is Reader in North African and French Studies. She is writing in a personal capacity.