The child porn riot surrounding Netflix film Cuties is a shame, because it is a well-acted, extremely strong debut ★★★★ ☆

It’s a nightmare for a budding filmmaker. Cuties, the film by the French-Senegalese Maïmouna Doucouré, was not even seen by the general public when the director was already accused of producing child pornography. Defending himself did not help. US senators, including Ted Cruz, even called for a judicial investigation last weekend into the film about four 11-year-old girls from the Parisian banlieue who form a dance group.

At the world premiere at the Sundance Festival in February, nothing was going on yet. There, the debut of the young director, who incorporated her own experiences as a refugee into the film, was still praised. But when distributor Netflix published a poster featuring the four protagonists in defiant poses in tiny outfits, the trailer appeared with prepubers shaking their bottoms and it started to buzz on social media that this was food for pedophiles. “Sorry for the misleading marketing campaign,” said Netflix; “Watch the film first,” Doucouré responded. But now that it can be seen, it appears that the fire has not been extinguished. After the release it sounds #cancelnetflix just louder.

Of Cutiesfuss poses two problems. The discussion has become so heated that opponents are automatically pushed into the (extreme) right-hand corner, preferably in the QAnon camp, that of conspiracy thinkers who believe that a secret pedophile network is being run from Hollywood. Proponents are unceremoniously called pedophiles – both the Doucouré and American and British critics received death threats. Second problem: blank to Cuties you can no longer watch. The dance scenes receive a disproportionate amount of attention.

That is a shame, because Cuties is a well-acted, extremely strong debut. A fresh coming-of-age story: while young Senegalese Amy hears in the mosque that scantily clad women are going to hell, she sees that her neighbor is inside her. turtleneck sweater is much more free in life than her veiled mother, who dutifully organizes a wedding for her husband and his second, young wife. By secretly joining the girl next door’s dance troupe, Amy claims her autonomy.

Initially there is little going on with those dances. The girls make synchronous steps that you also see in the average TikTok video. It’s Amy introducing twerking and grinding – hoping for more likes, more attention, more popularity. This results in two scenes that are downright uncomfortable, with 11-year-olds filmed at cruising height, making sex movements on the ground, looking into the camera with fingers in their mouths, after which it slides past their barely developed bodies. They are Lolitas who do not yet know what a condom looks like, but they have learned via social media that the female body is a means to get things done.

That those scenes are unpleasant to watch is the intention. With her film Doucouré criticizes the image that unaccompanied pre-teens are presented and copied via the internet. Their behavior is also only disapproved in the film. And Cuties encompasses much more: it is about how women seek their freedom of movement within society and between two different cultures, and about how to wrestle you from the image that others place on you.

Nevertheless, it is true that in that nuanced film, Doucouré portrays a couple of pre-teenagers sexualized. Actresses who are of an age when they cannot yet foresee the consequences of this – something that the director herself demonstrates with her film.

Can you sue eroticizing young girls by doing it yourself? With this message, could this film have been done without those scenes? By the way, does it not happen more often, but more subtly, that sexualizing young actresses in coming-of-age films? Cuties should have started a much more interesting, nuanced discussion than this simplistic yes-no that now overshadows everything.