There are parts I really appreciated in the film but for all of its duration I was extremely uneasy with the fact that the film seems to completely forget it stages the sexuality of an infant. Debating free will and consent are one thing, one very good thing in fact. But by the time she arrives in Lisbon, she is a child. No two ways about that.
I don't think the film forgets that. The film is developing this fictional idea of a child in the body of an adult to explore what a life unaffected by societal conditioning, determined only by passion and lust would look like. If she chooses to have sex, so what? As you say, the big question is whether it happens consensually or not. At one point early in the movie, before the Lisbon sequence, the film hints at the possibility that she could be taken advantage of. But then it quite quickly makes very clear that she seeks sex on her own initiative and that she is the one who has the upper hand in all of her sexual encounters.
What makes me uneasy is how children in real life are brought up, in many cases learning that they have to submit themselves to certain social roles etc. in order to fit in in fundamentally oppressive systems. For instance Instagram and TikTok showing young girls how to perfectly fulfill the role of the sexy woman, dress and style themselves accordingly, in a hyper-sexualized way. That, to me, is a far bigger scandal than seeing a pure, liberated girl/woman/human being living the way she wants and I think this disparity is what the film wants to address.
I just don't get this conservative talking point that this film showed that "Hollywood wants to normalize pedophilia". It would be another thing if it was the story of an actual child engaging with men three times her age. But by inventing this figure of a woman with a child's mind, it so clearly points at the values lying behind the story, values of freedom and choice and liberation, and does not sexualize children (while other more mainstream Hollywood productions certainly do).
