Review: Cuties (2020)
★★★½
Cuties is a well acted and scripted coming-of-age story about a young girl torn between two competing notions of womanhood. Amy has always abided by the more traditional notions of womanhood embraced by her family and former culture, which values modesty and timidity, but her life is turned upside down once she’s exposed to a more modern notion of womanhood embraced by her friends and new culture, which values sexuality and tenacity. Cuties does not endorse one notion of womanhood over the other, though. It instead takes a nuanced look at how these notions interact with each other and affect women in the real world, hoping to critique each in service of finding a harmonious middle-way.
This modern notion of womanhood is revealed to operate through mechanisms that, like the traditional notions, subject women to objectification, control, and shame. Instead of taking control of her sexuality on her own terms and in her own time, Amy is pressured by peers and media into conforming to what she takes to be desirable and wanted. Instead of Amy being tenacious in service of her own ends and values, her newfound tenaciousness is subordinated to servings the ends and values of her culture. And while social media and smart phones are useful for much, Cuties argues that, like all technology, they can interact with culture and society to become instruments of control.
These competing notions of womanhood are compared and contrasted and this tension takes its toll on the lives of the main characters in various ways. But Amy reaches a breaking point during the climactic dance performance and rejects the artificial persona she’s been adopting out of insecurity. But she doesn’t exactly return to the traditional notions of womanhood embraced by her mother and aunt. Instead of the burqa she wore at the beginning, and instead of the scantily clad outfits she wore in between, we last see Amy wearing more ordinary clothing that’s neither modest nor sexual.
This film is shot and presented almost entirely through the point of view of Amy. We see the world more or less through her eyes and her subjective outlook. However, there are two sequences that are oddly shot in a voyeuristic fashion, seemingly departing from Amy’s perspective and engaging in the very kind of sexualization that Cuties is taking issue with. I cannot make sense of these scenes and they consequently feel incongruent with the themes the movie otherwise conveys in a thoughtful manner.
