This is what cinema is for: Netflix’s Cuties reviewed

Cuties is the subject of a moral panic and a hashtag #CancelNetflix. It tells the story of Amy (Fathia Youssouf), an 11-year-old Franco-Senegalese girl living in Paris, who learns that her father is taking a second wife. (Polygamy is widespread in west Africa, but you wouldn’t know it from mainstream cinema. You wouldn’t know much from mainstream cinema.) The film deals with the lead-up to the wedding. Amy watches the suffering of her mother (the superb Maïmouna Gueye), who must prepare the house for the interloper, scattering cushions over the marital bed, and the bombast of her small brother, who eats cereal and is learning to be a misogynist. (I suspect the baby will get there too, in the end. But he will have to learn to talk first.) There is also a terrifying Auntie (Mbissine Thérèse Diop) who holds the patriarchy up, almost by herself.

This agony brings Amy to a crisis. Realising her powerlessness — she cannot comfort her mother but must instead sit through Auntie’s lectures (‘Women must be pious because in hell they will be much more numerous than men will be; we must remain modest; we must obey our husbands’) — she sexualises herself. This is not abnormal when a family ruptures: an unhappy child will wish themselves an adult for they imagine they will be able to bear the pain that way. This being 2020, Amy learns sexuality from the internet through a smartphone and joins a dance troupe with other lonely, angry girls: she gurns, licks her fingers and ‘twerks’, in a ghastly parody of an adult woman. It is pitiable, and it is normal. When Humbert Humbert wrote of Lolita, ‘Reader, she seduced me,’ it was plausible, and that is why it was shocking.