@FloralBunting
But they also know how their immaturity gives them a treacherous power, as we see when a security guard tries to hustle them out for trespassing and they brand him as a child molester. These certainly aren’t your neighbourhood’s average polite children. They’re twerking terrors of the pavement.
Treacherous power? This whole section is suggesting that these girls 'know what they're doing' and have power over male adults. This review is a disgrace, and the attitude it demonstrates is exactly what those of us who have complained are talking about. Frankly, I think the suggestion to check his hard drive sounds reasonable.
I don't know. I think the danger of this is what the film is trying to talk about, and that's what the review is saying. The problem is that the execution fails, and that's because of larger blind spots in our culture around representation by actors.
Young girls are sometimes quite aware of this sort of sexual power, and it is indeed very treacherous. They understand it's dangers, only that they can potentially use it, and that it gets them something, be it attention or material goods or whatever. That's the problem, it's a type of power in the most immediate sense, from their perspective, but they can't see the bigger picture or consequences.
That's a major theme in literature, isn't it? That power is very appealing and seductive but always asks a price, or changes the person who seeks it. We protect children from that because they are more vulnerable even than adults in making that trade, and that it makes them easily exploitable.
It's an interesting story for a film because it really is a major divide in our culture. Children are increasingly being sexualised overtly - the outfits those kids wear are nothing you wouldn't see in hundreds of dance competitions - yet people are also hugely reactive against things like child sexual abuse in institutions. The same mothers putting their kids in these dance competitions or buying these clothes for young girls, and objecting to school dress codes that disallow them, would freak out at statements about their daughters being sexually desirable. But they must know that they themselves are sexualising them. And the same is true in the culture more widely. We are celebrating and denying the very same thing.
The director seems to want to contrast that with what she experienced in a community that claims to protect girls and women from sexual exploitation, by saying that too fails in another way. It's rather bleak really, she doesn't seem to see another option on the table.
The failure is that she doesn't seemed to have considered that her child actors are real people, and that she has used them to create another example of the spectacle she is being critical of.