Mignonnes AKA Cuties Review

 

Now then boys and girls i've covered alot of controversial films but those film have nothing compared to this film. It's due to the controversies about this film that i will NOT be including a certain poster because honestly I wouldn't feel comfortable using it but I will be talking about the controversy because honestly if your going to talk about this film then you have to talk about the controversy surrounding it and so here is my review of "Mignonnes" otherwise known as "Cuties" enjoy the review everyone.

The plot of the movie is Amy (i'm not going to tell you her age because honestly it's freaking disgusting what they have these girls doing) because infatuated with a certain dance crew and begins to question everything around her. Honestly if they wanted to have the plot be about a young girl questioning things around her they didn't need to include the dance that they do but the story as a whole I feel is fairly decent but the subject matter could have been handled much , much better in my opinion.

Now i'm watching the English dubbed version of this film and I can't find who dubbed the voices as such i'll only be crediting the original actors. As such starring in this film is Fathia Youssouf as Amy , Médina El Aidi-Azouni as Angelica , Maïmouna Gueye as Mariam , Esther Gohourou as Coumba , Ilanah Cami-Goursolas as Jess , Myriam Hamma as Yasmine , Mbissine Therese Diop as The Aunt , Demba Diaw as Ismael and Mamadou Samaké as Samba.

The acting in he film is honestly one of the best things about the film since all of the actors both young and old are truly giving it there best shot. What really helps the actors for me is the script which is written by the film's director Maïmouna Doucouré who is making her feature film directorial debut with this film and her script gives the characters so much personality and is so fresh and different that all the actors have to do is say the lines as there written and they'd give a really freaking good performance in my opinion they would anyways.

Like I said at the start of the review there's no way in hell i'd be able to talk  about this film and not talk about the controversy that Netflix started. Since the poster that i've used for the film is the film's official poster where as the one that Netflix created shows the main young girls in very revealing outfits and well to say that it went down badly would be a huge understatement because not only did it go down very badly the director of the film actually received death threats because people who saw only that poster assumed that the poster is an accurate representation of the film.

Not helping things is the fact that Netflix released a trailer which highly sexualised the young female cast. Also not helping things is the fact the film saw 600 young girls all audition for the film which means that they saw 600 young girls all around the ages of eleven to let's say thirteen doing a highly inappropriate dance routine which is so wrong on so many levels and even the trailer which right now as of this writing sits at 1.6 million dislikes isn't an accurate representation of the film but it's damn close.

Now people were saying that Netflix are sexualising the main cast and I can't help but agree since there's one thing that they could have censored but chose not to. It's the fact that in one very brief shot one of the young girls who again i'm not going to say there age accidentally reveals her b**b and they show it for a good few seconds , I honestly feel that if Netflix was to censor something this should have been it just because it was disgusting to see and it's not something that should have been allowed in the final film hell it shouldn't have even been filmed or written.

This film does the idea of kids trying to act like adults honestly rather well in my opinion since it's something that is relevant to any age and any generation. This is something that we see all throughout the film with the girls saying that there fourteen when there much younger just to impress a boy or due to the fact that we see the girls wearing very revealing clothes and acting like adults just because they think it's fun , it's something that while it does seem disgusting it's also something that ties into a guess the films main theme of just be yourself and be glad to just be a kid.

Now then this film is listed as a comedy drama and well on the comedy front I feel that the film fails pretty badly. Since I didn't laugh once during the film hell I don't think I even raised a smile once during the film at all which for a comedy is never a good thing at all hell even bad comedies at least manage to get a smile out of me and so you know that you've failed when people can't even get a smile due to any of your jokes.

As a drama I do feel that this film fairs a little bit better but not by much if i'm being totally honest with you all. Since the film does feature a lot of drama and it lays the drama on thick all throughout the film which does mean that the more dramatic elements of the film don't really work as well since your just so sick of seeing them and so you just end up feeling drained due to all the dramatic moments with no moments of levity.

Now I would talk about the dancing in the film however given the dance that the girls do and the ages og the young actors playing them I wouldn't feel comfortable doing. I will however say that despite the film being an hour and thirty six minuets long it actually feels alot longer then that I don't know why that is but this film felt like it was on for two hours instead of just over an hour and thirty five minuets it could be a pacing issues since some scene do feel a bit long or it could come back to what I said about the drama in the film.

Overall this film is going to be judged purely by it's controversy by many people hell some even judged it before it even came out due to it's controversy. I however will not be doing that yes this film has alot of disgusting moments in it i'm not going to lie but but those elements don't take away from the overall quality of the film but it does make the film and those moments hard to sit through as such for the first time i'm not going to give this film a rating just because I wouldn't feel comfortable giving it a high score which is what it deserves and i'd be lying if I gave it a low or even a medium score that's how hard it is to fully judge this film.

All the images that I got for this review were gathered from either Wikipedia or Google Images and nowhere else. They we go guys i've seen what is perhaps the most controversial film of the past several years and as if you cannot tell I did try to judge this film as a film and not by everything that was surrounding the film that said however I don't recommend watching this film just because there are alot of moments which are difficult to sit through and I did my best to not use any overly sexualised images of the films young female cast where ever possible.