Writer-director Samuel Theis’s Softie has the ingredients of the kind of inspirational social drama that Hollywood specializes in: a freshly arrived teacher at a primary school sees potential in a disadvantaged but precocious young student; the child’s mother, who’s soured by the demands of a life lived amid grinding poverty, rejects her son’s burgeoning affinity for school and his teacher; and a misunderstanding about the relationship between the teacher and student leads to conflict in what becomes a coming-of-age ordeal. But Theis’s account of class and sexual precarity remains knotty and unresolved in ways that one doesn’t expect from the typical melodrama about impoverished youth. Rather than teaching a lesson, Softie seems much more interested in conveying an experience.
Johnny (Aliocha Reinert) is a 10-year-old boy with long golden hair who lives in a public housing project in the eastern French region of Alsace-Lorraine. Unlike his tough but, in her way, loving mother, Sonia (Mélissa Olexa), Johnny is mild-mannered and sensitive. His priority, when his family flees Sonia’s abusive boyfriend’s apartment in the film’s pre-title prologue, is to save the man’s pet fish and place them in a new tank before the oxygen in their water-filled plastic bags is depleted. Johnny’s open, reflexive care for living things sometimes comes into conflict with his environment, as when boys around his age begin harassing him and his dog as they return from a walk later on in the film. Forced to come to the rescue, Sonia shouts at him that he has to learn how to fight when he’s confronted like that.
Reinert doesn’t exhibit remarkable range, but Theis uses the young actor’s lack of artifice to the film’s advantage, as the subdued nature of the performance seems to suit Johnny’s meekness and inwardness. When Johnny meets and wins the admiration of his new teacher, Mr. Adamski (Antoine Reinartz), he begins to open up a little bit, but his precise feelings about the man’s encouragement remain somewhat opaque. When he spends an evening after school spying on Adamski and his girlfriend, Nora (French rock singer Izïa Higelin) spending an evening in their comfortable home, you may wonder what’s going through his mind.
A similar ambivalence runs through a later scene, in which Adamski and Nora—in a professionally risky move—take the young student to a late-night museum exhibition. Theis uses the anonymous crowd and, to a 10-year-old, bewildering exhibition space to create a sense of both discovery and foreboding. The scene concludes abruptly with an initially enigmatic image that will turn out to be an almost too-pat metaphor about the feelings that Johnny is projecting onto his teacher: From the young boy’s perspective, we see Adamski’s handsome profile, bathed in the light of a projected video from an art installation.
However much it turns out to conceptually align with what’s going on beneath Johnny’s relatively impassive exterior, this moment possesses an ambiguous ominousness that feels a bit out of step with where the story goes. Theis proves much more interested in the pain of small mistakes and miscommunications than he is in grand drama. Still, Softie ventures into territory that, with Maïmouna Doucouré’s Cuties, proved to be relatively volatile: the sexuality of marginalized French pre-teens. Providing a straightforward glance into the experience of navigating a queer identity when one’s environment provides little to no models for expressing it, Softie is a noteworthy repurposing of the coming-of-age social drama.
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