Netflix Coming-of-Age Film ‘Cuties’ Accused of Sexualizing Minors

Netflix recently unveiled the poster for French coming-of-age drama Cuties, known as Mignonnes in French, and boy was the internet not pleased about it, claiming the poster inappropriately sexualized its pre-teen cast, especially compared to the original French poster.

L'Affiche promo de #Mignonnes #Cuties en France vs par Netflix. Pourquoi ils ont fait ça ? 🤦🏿‍♀️ pic.twitter.com/CeD26nuLEo

— Angela Abar (@TheSisterNight) August 20, 2020

Now, personally, I can’t see anything sexualized because all my mental bandwidth is consumed with trying to figure out why they photoshopped Billy Baldwin’s face onto that blonde girl.

I thought it was obvious that was supposed to look like a child beauty pageant or Olympic gymnastics or something like that, but judging by my Twitter feed it seems a lot of people thought Netflix was advertising child pornography. My first clue that this wasn’t going to be anything close to child pornography is that it was screened at Sundance and is on fucking Netflix.

There’s a trailer for the film on YouTube.

It kind of looks like Bend it Like Beckham only with dancing instead of soccer and without the dangling plot threads of a lesbian love story that had been removed at the last minute. Yeah, that scene of Jules’ mother yelling at Jesminder and calling her a lesbian actually makes sense now, doesn’t it?

Now I haven’t seen Cuties because it isn’t out yet and I wasn’t invited to Sundance, but reviews of the film seem to agree that it is about the characters struggling with the sexualization of young girls and falls firmly on the side of “it’s bad.” So the lesson here is that maybe you should watch movies before you start a campaign to have it eradicated from the face of the Earth.

And let’s not forget that if Netflix had it put out this oddly sexual poster that they changed and apologized for, they wouldn’t have gotten all this free press and social media buzz. So I’m sure they learned their lesson.