This French film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year where it won a directing award for its creator, Maïmouna Doucouré, a Parisian with parents from Senegal, a small country in West Africa that was a French colony that is predominantly a Muslim country now. It is about Doucouré's experience seeing the clashing of modern French culture and traditional Senegalese culture, focusing on the sexualization and hyper-sexualization of young girls. Based on a poster that was released online by Netflix, this film's distributor, people began protesting and speaking out against the film and calling for people to cancel their Netflix subscription, if Netflix didn't ban or remove this film. Some extreme responses have called the film "child porn" and contributing to pedophiles. I have to say that I wholeheartedly disagree. This film is not child porn and it doesn't "whet the appetite of pedophiles" as Representative Tulsi Gabbard said in a tweet.
Doucouré's work here is a critique of the kind of sexualization of children, particularly young girls, that the people trying to cancel Netflix are allegedly about. People might object to the imagery of children in the film, either the costumes they wear or the choreography, as well as the camerawork showing us both. However, the question becomes if a person wanted to do a film about this kind of sexualization, how would you or could you do it, if you can't show the imagery? It's a film, so not showing imagery is antithetical to the point of visual media. Obviously, there would have to be a balance of how much one indulges in that specific imagery, so that it's not necessarily exploitative but also not repetitive. That balance would have to be met with a narrative and character development that drives home the point of criticism. I believe that Doucouré strikes that balance.
Fathia Youssouf stars as Amy Diop, a 11-year-old girl living in Paris with her family in an impoverished part of town. Her family consists of her mother, her younger brother and her baby sibling. Her mother is married, but her husband and Amy's father lives in Senegal. Her mother is clearly Muslim and tries to push the country's traditions onto Amy. Those traditions are a lot of stereotypical, gender roles like being dutiful to men, learning to cook and wearing certain clothes that hide rather than reveal one's body. However, when Amy sees another girl her age dancing in the laundry room, she becomes fascinated with this girl who is part of a dance troupe.
Médina El Aidi-Azouni co-stars as Angelica, the aforementioned girl who was dancing in the laundry room. She lives in the same building with her family, including an older brother. She also leads the dance troupe. She does so pretty aggressively. When Amy helps her one day, she becomes more sympathetic and welcoming. The general tone of the girls though is that they want to seem older. They're interested in boys and curious about sex. They even pretend to be older when in the presence of older boys, but it's clear that some, if not most of them really don't know that much about sex. One scene has one girl pick up a used condom and think it's a balloon.
This is in general the theme of a lot of coming-of-age stories regarding children under the age of 14. Children often are in a rush to grow up. They often want to look and act more grown-up than they actually are. We saw a bit of that in Bo Burnham's
Eighth Grade (2018), which involves a girl under 14 trying to hang out with older kids, talking about sex and almost engaging in it. An extreme example is Larry Clark's
Kids (1995), which is about teenagers, some even under 14, not only talking about sex but actually having sex. This film is nowhere near
Kids in terms of its provocative depictions. It's actually closer to
Eighth Grade, but it does push the envelope a bit because it wants to show what would be objectionable.
We see Amy watch music videos online via a smart phone or other dance routines. A lot of music videos, especially music videos that cater to black people or black culture, such as R&B and hip hop music, do have dancing and images that are very sexual or suggestive of sex acts. Amy watches a lot of them, and she starts to imitate those dance moves. She learns the moves and absorbs them so well and so quickly that it impresses the other girls. However, Amy begins to take it too far and begins to copy and push things she sees online that's sexual more and more, even weaponizing it when in the presence of older men. From films like Lolita (1962) to American Beauty (1999), this idea of young girls being seen in a sexual way by older men has been done worse. That's not the case here.
This film never has a man lusting after a young girl and gazing at her in that way. The only gazes that we see are those of people who are disturbed by what they see. It even gets to the point that the other girls with whom Amy dances start to look at her with an aversion. Often those people are members of the Senegalese and Muslim community. The film doesn't exactly argue that their perspectives, which are obviously more conservative, are the correct perspectives. There's some deconstruction here of how that culture is problematic and limiting to women in its own ways, but it doesn't glamorize what these girls are doing when mimicking the videos and things in culture that are more sexy.
Unlike the aforementioned films, it never puts the children into sexual or even potential sexual situations. In terms of whetting the appetite for pedophiles, this film is merely depicting what's already happening in the culture, and not only among dancers. Dancers usually start when they're young, such as when they're children. The Lifetime series Dance Moms (2011) proved that. Netflix's Cheer (2020) also proved that. In fact, the dances and outfits from both those series, documenting real-life dancers and organizations, are not that dissimilar from what we see here in Doucouré's film.
Anyone saying that this film somehow crosses a line isn't paying attention to what's happening in culture. People complaining about this film clearly haven't seen something like Todd Solondz's
Happiness (1998), which involves a literal pedophile. In Pedro Almodovar's recent Oscar-nominated film
Pain and Glory (2019), there is a scene where a young boy has a sexual awakening staring at a nude older boy. Honestly, you could go to a public beach and see more provocative things than here.
This is good filmmaking from a great, female filmmaker.
If you liked this film, more to check out include Girlhood (2015) and The Fits (2016).
Rated TV-MA.
Running Time: 1 hr. and 36 mins.
Available on Netflix.
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