Out of curiosity, I checked out this film and read some articles about its existence. As stated above, the director caught a lot of flack for her depiction of child nudity (as one's natural reaction should be). However, after actually watching the movie itself, it's simultaneously not as egregious as OP puts it to be and worse than what OP puts it to be.
Before I start, if you're as horrifically curious as I was and want to watch the movie, don't. I'm a big fan of pretentious art house films (see
Michael Haneke), but this is one of those pretentious art films where even I can't stomach it. The whole thing is your classic European fart huffing extravaganza on a topic already thoroughly explored in a Speilberg blockbuster several decades ago.
However, if you REALLY want to watch it, you can catch the movie on MUBI, or if you don't want to pay for some artsy fartsy movie site to watch it, you can catch it here: [Illegal link] If you can torrent the thing with subs, I advise you to do that, because with watching on your device (preferably a PC with a skip forward button), you do NOT want to be buffering on the wrong scene.
If you WANT to know where to skip, there's one scene at the 10-minute mark, and the other at the 25-minute mark. If it's inaccurate, let me make this easier: if you see a scene where Elli has an exposed shoulder outdoors, or the scene where Elli gets her android tongue removed, skip ahead for 30 seconds. I had to learn that lesson the hard way. I demolished my right-arrow button so badly.
But if you don't want to play that game but still want to watch it, I'll just recommend you start watching at the 40-minute mark. Once you see a scene of some young girl getting into an old guy's car, you're in the clear.
So let me explain the first half of my claim.
Rage Against the (Wrong) Machine
No. Cuties was worse by an entire metric mile. I've seen both films. I managed to sit through The Trouble With Being Born (henceforth referred to as T2WB2). I watched Cuties with frequent one-minute skips and I still couldn't make it to the end. Cuties was an active exploration of children's curiosity about sexuality in the worst way possible. Imagine if Lolita wanted to convey its themes but did so with explicit sex scenes. That's basically Cuties. Cuties didn't have nudity or explicit scenes, but it had so many heavily suggestive dance scenes that they drowned out its message with its antithetical presentation. Cuties advocates against something and yet it keeps falling over itself to depict that something, and when that message is "restrictive education will cause a child to rebel sexually", it sure fucken loves to show the consequences, so much so that they seem to glorify it for more than four-fifths of the movies (I went for a plot summary for the remaining quarter I tapped out watching).
As for T2WB2, I'll have to preface something first:
No, underage nudity, no matter the context, is not to be shown, even in CG. ESPECIALLY involving real child actors. The way the director went about it is by having said actor dress in a bikini and digitally inserting the rest of the body. Even so, no. The child actor can't consent to stuff like this. Hell, children in general, especially those in their early 10s, should not be presented with decisions on whether she wants fake nipples in her on-screen presence. Worse comes to worst, it sets a deep-seated trauma in the actor knowing that, even if it's CG, her body was once bare open to a wide audience, from head to camel toe to toe. You can't fix shit like that.
That said, T2WB2 doesn't promote pedophilia. Far from it. If you have a frontal lobe capable of memory storage and critical thinking, you would find that the movie makes it very obvious from the get-go that pedo is a no-go. If I have to be specific, the part where the pedophilia discussion comes in is during the first half.
The child android sex-doll in question, Elli, is heavily implied to be in a sexual relationship with who she calls Papa, which is the sex-doll's owner. When I say heavily imply, I don't mean flirting. I mean it as there was a scene where a drunk Papa brings Emil to his bathroom, pushes her down on the floor, and the movie cuts to a scene the next morning where Papa is repairing a part of Emil's torn skin on her thigh near her crotch while he says "Sorry."
If you still can't understand the implications behind this, you're not old enough to be on this side of the internet, mentally or physically. Get lost.
But if you're watching the movie without putting laser focus into the child sex scene (no, we're not going down the she's-technically-an-android route), you will find that the perversion is a symptom of the movie's bigger picture.
From here on out, I'm gonna spoil the film's main theme. However, I'll advise you to just not watch it and follow my summary. Trust me; I saved you an evening:
As it turns out, Papa had lost his daughter a long time ago. Ten years ago, in fact. The incident fractured his marriage and as a result, he bought a sex doll with explicit likeliness to his lost daughter to cope. That trauma, however, turned into perversion, and it becomes this sickening father-daughter relationship that extends into flirtatious dancing in the bathroom and sleeping together on the same bed in their undergarments.
So no, the movie isn't that pro-pedo message so many people claimed it to be. At best, it's a misunderstood film that tripped over its message with ill-fitting imagery and innuendos. At worse, it's a failure of child porn. Anyone would know this watching the movie; but because everyone is more focused on being mad (though in the context of the subject matter, rightfully so) than actually looking at the source material, now everyone directed their attention at some European arthouse film rather than the actual sickos out there doing real harm.
Seriously think about it, Epstein didn't need a Cuties to justify his island, nor did any public school teacher wait for Hollywood to give them a vague thumbs up to start sending nudes and molesting kids.
This is pure bullshit. It reeks of "I read the headline and made up the rest with my headcanon". No, it's not promoting pedophilia. No, it doesn't have degenerate messaging. Hell no, it's not some hidden gem. It's some obscure, self-congratulatory European art house movie that's periodically remembered because rage baits like this keep bringing up its name as the next Pedo Bible.
Yes, woodchip your local pedophile. I won't lose sleep knowing a kid diddler is serving as great fertilizer for the forest. But what the fuck does this do? If it is the new Hollywood-approved PSA to touch children, then what's the point of spreading its name as a hidden gem? Normal people would automatically know pedo is bad, and pedophiles don't need an external justification to do pedo shit, so again, what's the point of bringing this movie up? It's like you WANT people to know about this film and by extension, all the WRONG people to watch it. If there's anything turning society weak, it's bum asses like you who cry wolf about obvious values like not touching fucken kids. You're not Moses holding the Ten Commandments telling us there are fucked up people in Hollywood. Everyone knows that. What's worse is that the platform you're voicing this on is either a poor rage-bait article or an obscure YouTube video's incorrect summary of a movie you didn't even watch.
Cuties is RIGHT THERE as JUSTIFIED EVIDENCE on Hollywood rearing its ugly head into mainstream culture, and yet you decide to shine the message through the lens of some dead-in-the-water film festival reject as if having just one film with a poor depiction of children-adjacent sexuality in mainstream consciousness isn't enough.
In fact, why did you need a film to say this? You could've brought up the numerous cases involving public school staff members and government officials doing shit like this. Hell, Ezra Miller just revealed himself to be living on a farm with several underaged occupants along with unrestricted access to an excess of firearms. Let me rephrase it: a mentally unstable Hollywood actor living in the middle of bumfuck nowhere with children and guns. The guy has literally been caught coercing minors into sexual favours.
All of these real-life incidents, and you choose a self-cock-sucking Euro film that has bumfuck all to do with Hollywood.
Real fucking virtuous with you.
And in fact, fuck you, I actually agree with you. Not in the fact that this movie is promoting pedophilia, but that...
...Holy Fuck This Movie Fucking Sucks
It stinks to high heavens. It's terrible. On Christ, the only redeeming factor about this movie is the occasionally interesting visual motifs near the end of the movie. Other than that, the cast and acting are milquetoast, the plot is bare-boned, and the sci-fi is nonexistent.
I'll just summarize the movie for you:
Elli is a sex doll acquired by Papa, a guy who lost his daughter as a way to cope. As mentioned, that way to cope became perverted, and thus begins this vicious cycle of a grieving father turning his misery into lust. Elli, on the other hand, was implanted with fake memories of the real Elli - Papa's long-lost daughter. The movie's rising event begins when Elli's learning program begins to inhibit weird results, culminating in a climax where Emil walks away from Papa's house and runs into another car in the middle of a forest highway. From there, she meets someone new. A grandma who had a younger brother that died 60 years ago.
From there on out, Elli became Emil - said long-lost younger brother. He starts to coexist with the grandma, becoming the brother she once lost. However, Emil's experiences and lessons as Elli is not lost, and soon he starts to show signs of self-realization. The movie then splinters into two hypothetical endings shown through interjecting scenes: one shows Emil leaving the house and getting run over by a train while the other shows Emil having an altercation with the grandma that ends with her receiving a laceration in the back of her head, killing her.
The movie then ends with the image of Elli walking down a highway, alone with no other company besides a backpack, seemingly in pursuit of something.
If the summary entices you to go watch the movie, don't, because this movie could've easily been a 20-minute short but it just had to inject 70 more minutes of subpar cinematography and terrible scripting. The visuals drag on and on just to present a message the audiences already know since minute two. Yes, we fucking get it, using a robot to grieve doesn't work and there are many hypotheticals that could happen when we use a self-learning AI to power said robot. We didn't need a 2-minute long scene of a robot walking to a grocery store with a geriatric grandmother and her dog to know that.
What's worse is that it's basically a what-if on Speilberg's 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence, only with worse characters, a drabbier tone, and a plot that entices as much as it bores the fuck out of the audience.
With AI, Speilberg gives us caring if not memorable characters and performances to send its message about machine learning and the themes of love and remembrance adjacent to our humanity. T2WB2 is one hour shorter yet feels significantly longer to watch than AI because, for AI, Speilberg utilizes his given time to let the heavy plot and themes breathe while T2WB2 tried to only tell its stories through performances. The problem arises from the script and the writing, where much of it relies on existential questions that it constantly brings up without providing answers. It just hits the audience with this barrage of dread and fear for the consequences of AI in the future without telling us what to do about it or anything else for the matter.
T2WB2 suffers because it doesn't offer anything else besides its questions. The question it asks are good, but the medium it presents itself on is not. The direction is boring and as basic as it gets, the cinematography is uninspiring, and the actors are barely given anything to work with. From what I read, the child actor in question is working under a pseudonym to protect her identity. That's a responsible thing to do, don't get me wrong, but I don't think it even matters cause' no one's gonna look back at this film for critical remembrance. It's in the same vein as those obscure Oscar winners from the 2000s, with the only redeeming quality to this movie being its status as the "child robot sex" movie.
This movie offends me. Not just for its irresponsible direction of child nudity, but for its terrible quality.
Actually, let me just put on my tinfoil hat for a moment and join its two qualities for a conspiracy theory.
What Sells Better than Sex? Clicks.
It is my personal belief that the director knew while editing the film, that this movie isn't gonna fly. It's not gonna fucking work. It's boring as hell, with no unique quality to bring it forth among all the other movies during the film festival.
I think the child nudity scene was added late into post-production just so that the movie could eke out even just a little bit of attention. I won't put it behind movie studios to do such a thing, even if they're European companies. When all else fails, you can always resort to a bit of controversy to sell your product, because any publicity is good publicity. Child nudity is a BIG issue in cinema, no matter the context, and there's bound to be people inflaming a situation from worse to worst, and as human nature dictates, once you get a big enough sample, there's gonna be those very few contrarians that will undoubtedly side with the film and give the "Hidden Gem" title OP so feverishly dictates it has.
That's just my conspiracy theory, though, but seeing the track record of advertisement agencies from the past and how far they are willing to spend to advertise something, I wouldn't be surprised if it comes out to be true.
But the movie's dying in popularity anyway, and it's definitely for the best.
What a shitty IP, both from its movie and its discourse.
Rest in piss, bozo.
Instead I got a topic so boring, I already forgot what it was.