#CancelNetflix Trending After Twitter Users Blast Cuties As ‘Child Porn’ — While Critics Praise It!

D.Lo.

The critics — and the Twitics — have spoken, and depending on who you ask, the French film Cuties is either a coming-of-age masterpiece or an abomination that never should have seen the light of day!

The hashtag #CancelNetflix spiked to the top of Twitter’s trending topics a day after the already-chided film hit the streaming service, with a swarm of users accusing Cuties of depicting a hyper-sexualized view of minors and even promoting pedophilia.

Related: Rose McGowan Attacks Alexander Payne’s Movies After He Refutes Statutory Rape Claims!

It didn’t help that a clip of the film went viral showing the movie’s 11-year-old protagonists twerking and performing provocatively at a dance competition in front of adult onlookers:

Some of the many outraged Twitics pointed out that the film’s IMDB parental guide cautions that a young female’s breast is exposed during “an erotic dance scene,” while others noted that they didn’t even have to watch the full film to know that it was promoting “child porn.”

Users fumed:

But while the audience reaction to the film is essentially one big vomit emoji, professional critics feel a much different way about Maïmouna Doucouré’s directorial debut. Believe it or not, the film has a critics score of 90% (!!!) on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, with an audience score of just 5%.

Cuties Rotten tomatoes score
(c) Rotten Tomatoes

According to the professional movie watchers, these irate social media users are totally missing the point of the film, which focuses on Amy, an 11-year-old Senegalese girl who forms a twerking dance group with her other young friends.

Many critics are describing the controversial flick as a nuanced portrait of poor, unsupervised children failing to properly put hyper-sexualized media into perspective due to a lack of resources or knowledge. Rolling Stone’s David Fear called Cuties a “sensitive coming-of-age movie” that “is the polar opposite of what it’s accused of being.”

Richard Brody of The New Yorker wrote in his positive review:

“The subject of Cuties isn’t twerking; it’s children, especially poor and nonwhite children, who are deprived of the resources—the education, the emotional support, the open family discussion—to put sexualized media and pop culture into perspective. Cuties is about the absence of knowledge and absence of reasonable discourse about sex and sexuality, power and desire, that help young people to avow and confront these drives constructively—or, at least, not too destructively.”

The LA Times’ Justin Chang wrote:

“Society’s rampant sexualization of preadolescent girls is one topic that Doucouré subjects to tough critical scrutiny; she’s made an empathetic and analytical movie, not an exploitative one. Both her film and the unfortunate contretemps surrounding it make at least two things perfectly clear: A young girl can look at herself, really look at herself, and learn something truthful and powerful from the experience. Some putative grownups, by contrast, can never be bothered to do the hard work of looking at something, let alone learning from it.”

Other critics noted how Amy’s decision to join the dance group comes from a place of rebelling against her misogynistic culture, which she’s faced with after getting news that her father will be taking a second wife — something her mother is forced to be supportive about.

So it seems that there is more than meets the eye to this very polarizing French film. But even if it is a *critique* on how young children are emulating the hyper-sexual content they see on social media every day, does that excuse its more explicit moments?

What do U think, Perezcious readers? Is this film just too provocative? Is it too French?? Let us know what you think in the comments.

[Image via Netflix/Rotten Tomatoes]

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