Disclaimer: I’m not being paid by Netflix or the Director for this post. I am a long-time subscriber to Netflix. The following is my opinion about a coming of age pre-teen film.
This may come as a shock to some since I am a Faith Blogger and one would think I would be against a film that sexualizes pre-teen girls. But this film does not. The marketing did. I learned of this film before the marketing so I was aware it was a coming of age story. The way Cuties on Netflix was marketed shows they lack a disconnect to stories that are not what we call “mainstream” as well as a lack of diverse voices who would have been able to present this story in a better manner. I am a Christian but I also know there are stories from around the world that breaths deep into the humanity which as Christians we’re called to see. The lack of empathy people have towards this film due to the controversial, hyper-sexualized marketing ploy from Netflix will be the reason many more stories we’re not used to seeing will be silenced. The work of people like Maimouna Doucoure’ (the Director of Cuties) should be given a chance to be viewed as they are telling stories from their lives, cultures and perspectives.
This post will walk you through the film as if you’re watching it. So spoilers will happen and it will go in chronological order. My opinion will be sprinkled throughout giving commentary when I deem necessary. At the end a licensed therapist who works with teens will give her perspective.
If you choose to watch it, please do so with an open mind. If not, that is your choice. But don’t demonize those who choose to watch a story of a young girl trying to find herself and her voice stuck between two distinct cultures.
For the record, this film did not bash Islam like some of the posts online suggests. It did not glorify twerking either. It’s the collision of both those things that brings the tension that underlies within this storyline.
So let’s read-watch Cuties on Netflix.
It opens with Aminata (Amy) contemplating her decisions. The cover photo of this blog post is that snapshot.
The first scene shows Amy drawing a picture of her family to put on her mom’s bed as they move into a new apartment. Not yet settled into their first day, Amy and her mom head to an Islamic women’s prayer group in the building. The leader of the group states more women will end up in hell due to a lack of being pious and not dressing modestly. That doesn’t mean anything now but it will as the film progresses. As the women are leaving, Amy sees a green prayer necklace left on the floor. She takes it. This is the first thing Amy will steal over the course of the film. Her mother is stopped on the way out by the community’s auntie. She asks how they are settling in. Amy says everything is fine. At this point in Amy’s world, it is. As her mother continues to talk, Amy walks down the hall and finds a girl around her age dancing in the laundry room. Amy can’t stop watching. The girl is dressed exactly how the prayer group leader says women shouldn’t, especially those who will end up in hell. The girl (who we learn later is named Angelica or Angie) starts to iron her hair. I guess to straighten it. She looks up and Amy is startled and runs off.
That night Amy hears a noise outside her bedroom and walks to see what it is. It’s her mother staring at the empty room at the end of the hallway. She closes the door, walks past Amy, climbs into bed throwing Amy’s family photo on the ground. This whole scene is the basis of the tension within the plot.
Amy’s first day of school is a little chaotic. She’s barely given her schedule when all the students decide to do the mannequin challenge when the bells rings for school to start. So the teachers are running around fussing at the students to get to class. Angie and her group of friends are taken to the office due to their attire.
At home, Amy asks when her father is coming back. Her mother answers he’ll be back soon. You can tell that her mother is hiding something when she speaks. Later the auntie came by. Amy was playing in her mother’s clothes trying to look like the girls at school when she heard them talking. She hid under the bed. Her mother tells the auntie that her husband has taken a second wife and they both will be returning from Senegal soon. The auntie tells Amy’s mom that she needs to get over it and start letting everyone know a wedding will take place when the husband arrives. Her mother starts calling people to let them know. While on the phone with one she starts crying. Amy starts crying. She’s still hiding under the bed. The mother tells whoever was on the other end of the phone that they go disconnected. They did not. Her mother was crying so hard, I’m sure she put herself on mute. This was a pivotal moment as Amy felt her mother’s pain but it turned into something dangerous as time went on. This is when Amy started disconnecting from the life she once knew.
Amy is at the grocery store with her two younger brothers and Angie is there with her friends. They are acting all off 11 years old, laughing and playing around. After what Amy witnessed with her mother, she’s now enamored with Angie and her friends. I see this as Amy is searching for something else to belong to that’s not going to break her heart like the way her father taking a second wife broke her mother’s heart. Amy follows the girls to their “secret” dance spot. They throw rocks at her and eventually hit her in the head. Amy runs off with her brothers and the groceries. When she gets back to the apartment, her cousin is there with a van full of stuff her father has sent from Senegal. As she helps him unload, she steals his cell phone from the front seat. They are opening up the gifts her father sent when her younger brother runs in with his wedding attire on. This hits Amy hard. She realizes the dress she was holding was the dress she is expected to wear to her father’s wedding. Her mother asks if she doesn’t like it. It still hasn’t clicked with her mother that Amy is not okay or even understanding why her father has taken a second wife. Or maybe she thinks Amy will just go with the flow like she has had to do.
The next day at school Amy approaches Angie and her friends (Coumba, Yasmine, Jess). They recognize she was the one spying on them the day before. And laugh when they see the knot on her head. They taunt her by throwing her books and backpack. Angie tells them to stop. Even with all the taunting, Amy still wants to hang out with them. After school while her cousin is putting furniture together in the locked room at the end of the hall, Amy hears a noise outside. She opens the door and walks towards the stairs. Angie is running away from some guy with wet clothes in her arms. Amy and Angie run inside Amy’s apartment until the man leaves. This is when their friendship begins. Later that night she decides to create an IG-like account and post her first photo. It’s the “famous” one. The perched lips like you’re kissing with a side angle of one’s face. The way the light hits her face makes the photo cute. She posts it and immediately gets a like. That makes her feel good. So now Amy thinks likes will make her feel better than how she’s feeling. She turns and sees the dress for her father’s wedding was captured in the photo. It disgusts her.
The next day Angie comes over. Amy locks her younger brother in the bathroom so he can “swim”. Angie kicks down the door of the locked room and they both enter. Angie asks whose bedroom it is because it’s so elegant. It’s much nicer than Amy’s mother’s bedroom. Amy says she doesn’t know. Angie thinks that’s weird but they jump in the bed anyway. They eat candy, talk, laugh and act like 11 year old girls. Angie uses Amy’s stolen cell phone to show her videos of girls dancing for an upcoming competition she and her friends want to enter. Then Angie notices water coming through the closed door. Amy runs to the bathroom where her younger brother left the water running while he was swimming in the bathtub.
At the dance practice Angie brings Amy to film them so they can post it online. Jess and Coumba are not excited about having Amy there. Amy pulls out her phone and starts recording the girls dancing. Oh, she starts wearing her brother’s shirts so they look like a crop top on her. Angie thinks her “crop top” is cool. That makes Amy feel good. But when she takes the jacket off her waist Jess and Coumba start saying her behind is flat. And Yasmine joins them in making fun of her. Now mind you, all those little girls have flat bottoms. This will make sense for a later scene.
Back at the prayer group Amy hides under a veil and begins to watch suggestive and inappropriate videos for a girl her age. No one seems to be paying attention to Amy at all. As Amy is waiting for her mother to finish talking to the other women, Amy starts to notice the behinds of women walking in the hallway. None of those women are part of the prayer group. Their clothes make it easy to see their behind. But none of them are dressed like the videos Amy has secretly been watching. That evening her father called. The mother was telling him about the plans for the wedding and how things are progressing. She gives Amy the phone. Amy ignores her father and drops the phone out the window. I don’t know about you but I probably would talk to my child if they threw a phone out the window when the other parent was on the line. Her mother didn’t address that action.
Hanging out with Angie, Coumba, Yasmine and Jess doing each other’s make up to look like Kim K while eating cotton candy is what Amy probably wanted to do all along. Just have a group she felt she belonged to. But Amy took a turn and brought those girls with her. Keep reading. Anyway, Coumba found a condom which she thought was a balloon and blew it up. The other girls minus Amy knew what it was. They started screaming when Coumba put it in her chest acting like it was a big boob. They told Coumba she was going to get HIV because she put her lips on a condom. They went to Yasmine’s apartment and scrubbed Coumba’s mouth out with soap and water to kill the bacteria. Bless their little hearts. They really thought they were saving that girl.
They get online and see a boy is on a chat. Yasmine accidentally turns the camera on and he sees they are young. He yells at them and Angie gets mad at Yasmine. She throws Yasmine laptop on the floor and storms out the room. The other girls follow leaving Yasmine alone as her mother came in to see why they were all yelling. The next day Angie fights Yasmine at school because she’s still mad about the boy finding out she’s young. Here we see Angie has an anger problem and like Amy is trying to act older than her age. Amy is alarmed by the fight between these two friends yet she still wants to hang with Angie. At dance practice Amy introduces Angie, Coumba and Jess to moves she’s learned from the videos she’s been watching online. They get on board thinking these are better dance moves. Now Amy has become the mastermind behind the choreography for the dance for the upcoming dance competition.
Back at Angie’s apartment she shares with Amy that she’s been dancing since she was the in the womb. And this is what she wants to do with her life. She doesn’t feel supported by her parents because she doesn’t make good grades like her brother. She asks Amy what’s her dream. Amy said for her father to never come back. And right here is when we realize Amy is dealing with emotional trauma from how she heard her father has taken a second wife. Early the next morning Angie texts and says they got a spot to perform in the pre-selection. As Amy was reading the text her mother and auntie comes in to wake her up. Amy now has to learn how to be a woman. Meaning she has to get up and start cooking for her father’s wedding. She complies thinking she’ll finish and get to the competition. Little did she know how much prep work was ahead of her. Walking down the street carrying the food with her auntie and younger brother she dropped the food and ran off. She couldn’t get into the competition and watched her friends perform from a side window.
At school the next day, Jess and Coumba were upset yet Angie was conflicted. She likes Amy but understood the dance competition was important. Amy with tears falling down her face told them her auntie locked her up. She didn’t but she did keep her detained as to how she missed dancing with them. When Amy came back from watching her friends dance without her, her auntie was just about to start fussing at her. Then she noticed Amy was bleeding and started laughing. She helped Amy get cleaned up and told her she was a woman now. When her mother came to talk to her that night she told her the same thing. Amy looked down at herself and guess she was a woman now. Let me just say nothing was explained other than how to keep herself clean during this time. But that wasn’t shown on camera. Again, this film centers around Muslim women and there are just some things that won’t be stated but implied.
Waiting for announcements regarding the competition was stressing the girls out. They snuck into a laser tag place and got caught. One of the employees asked for their parent’s phone numbers so he could call them. He grabbed Angie by the arm and they started yelling he was groping them and called him a child monster. Another employee came by to see what was happening. They said they were dancers and Amy started dancing suggestively like she’s seen in the videos for them. It made the men feel uncomfortable. Jess got a text that let them know they made it to the final round of competition. They screamed for joy and ran off.
The incident at laser tag made Amy start feeling herself a little too much. She showed up at school dressed in a middrift top and leather pants. Everyone at school noticed and she got all the attention. The girls were walking outside in the courtyard at school and one of the older girls from the dance group they despise threw a soda can at them. Amy really feeling herself took it upon herself to go fight the girl. She got her butt kicked and they pulled down her pants. Everyone laughed. Angie and the girls helped Amy get up and they all left.
Vacuuming her mom’s room she took money out of her mother’s dresser drawer. Then spent it on new underwear for her and her friends along with a toy for her younger brother. I think she was buying what she saw the women in the videos wearing. The brother got caught with the toy and told their mother Amy bought it along with stuff for her friends. Amy denied it and her mother didn’t press the issue. The mother didn’t seem to want to press issues with Amy or was too wrapped up in her own pain. Pouring water into the cups for dinner Amy and her brother watched their mother faint. Her brother panicked and she acted as if nothing happened. The cousin came to make sure the mother was okay and realized Amy had stolen his phone. He tried to get it back and Amy unzipped her pants thinking he wanted to do something. He immediately stopped that. Took the phone but Amy bit him and took the phone back. She locked herself in the bathroom and posted a photo online of her lower region area with nothing on. At this point, Amy needed professional help. And the photo wasn’t shown on camera.
A boy slapped her butt at school the next day saying she posted the photo so she asked for it and she stabbed his hand with a pair of scissors. At home her mother yelled and slapped her for all that she found out Amy had done. The auntie stopped the mother and Amy ran off to be with her friends. They also weren’t feeling Amy. They told her they weren’t strippers and her actions made them all look bad. They left while Amy was trying to force them to practice the dance. Later at home a holy man, I guess, came to see her. This was after they tried throwing holy water on her. Which she made a joke by twerking as the women were trying to cast out the demon they thought was in her. Back to the holy man. He said she had no evil or demons in her. And he understood the husband taking a second wife was a lot to handle. Finally, someone was able to connect the dots. He told the mother if the burden was too heavy she could leave the marriage. The next day Amy finally sees a woman in white walking around the once locked room. It’s her father’s new wife. She flees the apartment.
It’s competition day and Amy is determined to perform despite being kicked out of the group. She waits for Yasmine to walk by and pushes her into a body of water. Literally stood there watching her struggle. Seriously, Amy was devoid of all emotion by this point in my opinion. She arrives to the competition and the other girls are confused. Reluctantly, they agree to dance with her. The audience was not really feeling their dance. Shock and horrified looks swept across the faces of many of the attendees. The girls really thought they are doing something. This is the scene, the clip that was floated all over the internet to market the film. This scene was the tipping point of the entire film. Towards the end of the dance Amy freezes and starts crying. I think the realization has finally hit her. She had never truly processed how she felt about her father taking a second wife. She runs off the stage home. Her auntie berets her for what she’s wearing and how she looks. This time her mother is the one defending her.
Her mother tells her she doesn’t have to attend the wedding. She hugs her mother and her mother leaves for the wedding in the community room of the building. Amy looks at her wedding attire one last time then puts on a pair of jeans and an age appropriate top. She goes downstairs and briefly looks at everyone dancing at the wedding. She exits the building and sees a different group of girls jumping rope. They let her join. She jumps and has the biggest smile on her face. The end.
The dancing is a metaphor for the hurt, frustration and anger Amy felt about her father’s new wife which she was unable to verbally express.
I reached out to a friend who is a counselor and works with teens. I wanted an expert perspective on this film as well. Here’s what she had to say. Stephanie Davis, M.Ed. LPC is a therapist who focuses on self-care.
While some saw Cuties as a child exploitation or borderline child pornography, it depicted the journey of self-discovery that teens often experience while seeking acceptance & establishing their own identity in the midst of societal & familial norms. Amy is reflective of those teens (young ladies in this case), who are trying to navigate life with lost signals. Imagine the challenges during this developmental stage. Some are just left to figure it out with little to no guidance or support. Kids go where they feel love & accepted, even if it’s not the best choice. They, like Amy, can be impressionable & will behave in ways that get the “cool points”. From joining the mean girls gang, stealing a phone to competing for social media likes, to copying provocative dance moves from popular dance groups. While there may have been nothing cute about Cuties, it can be a teaching tool to start conversations about how to create safe environments of empathy to correct youth with compassion & not harsh criticism. Maybe Cuties was a call to action to get more involved & model positive behavior.
Stephanie Davis, M.Ed. LPC – 323 Counseling and Consulting Services, PLLC.
This month I’m celebrating 9 years as a paid professional blogger. That’s right. I’ve been paid to blog since 2011. Even though I started blogging in 2009, it was just an outlet to express myself. Then September 2011 rolled around and I decided I would make blogging a career option for me. Now here we are 9 years later and I’m still creating content that is authentically transparent. If you have been blessed by my content in anyway over the years, please contribute to my cashapp $VernettaRFreeney Thanks for rocking with me. Your support means so much to me.
Thank you for sharing your post. I especially appreciate the portion highlighting therapist Stephanie Davis. Your commentary is very much connected to the article I’ve read. I appreciate that there are writers/bloggers who are offering another perspective.
Happy 9th Anniversary.
Thanks for reading. Yes, I wanted an expert perspective on this topic. She definitely gave me an aha moment I didn’t think about. Thank you!!!