09/07/2021 - CANNES 2021: Returning to Forbach after Party Girl, Samuel Theis signs a very endearing, simple and subtle piece of work, on the awakening of a boy from a modest background towards new horizons

“Islands where we will never land. Islands where we will never go. Islands covered with vegetation. Islands crouching like jaguars. Silent islands. Motionless islands. Unforgettable and nameless islands.” It’s this Blaise Cendrars poem that Johnny, 10 years old, timidly recites to his school teacher in Softie [+see also:
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interview: Samuel Theis
film profile] by Samuel Theis (his second feature after 2014 Caméra d’Or winner Party Girl [+see also:
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film profile] which he had codirected), presented in a special screening of the 60th Critics’ Week of the 74th Cannes Film Festival. This poetry symbolises rather well the small industrial town of Forbach dear to the director where the arrival of a foreign teacher opens up unexpected horizons for the young hero.

“You’ll take some punches, but you have to give some too: stop being so fragile!” In the daily life of Johnny (Aliocha Reinert), who looks like an angel from the streets with his long blond hair, there isn’t much poetry. He hardly ever knew his father, and his mother (Mélissa Olexa), a cashier in a tobacco shop who goes from dumped boyfriends to drunken one night stands, is loving but a little harsh (“let him stay at yours because if I see him, I’ll fuck him up”), his older brother leads his teenage life and Johnny often has to take care of his little sister, because there’s also a baby in the family. Nevertheless, despite the disadvantaged social context of the housing project, the atmosphere is happy: this is who we are where we are.

But when we’re ten, we’re discovering, we are curious, we’re searching for who we are, and we’re waking up, and a decisive encounter looms over Johnny – that with Jean Adamski (Antoine Reinartz), a teacher coming from Lyon with his wife Nora (Izïa Higelin) who works in the Metz contemporary art museum nearby. It all begins during class with a simple question (“how do you imagine yourself in 20 years time?”) that pushes Johnny and Mr Adamski to progressively forge an ever more personal student-mentor relationship. But affection has limits that we can’t really see when we’re ten, and extracting ourselves from our social background isn’t always easy…

An intimate and delicate story, bittersweet and at once simple and profound, Softie subtly explores the different facets of the emotional, intellectual but also sexual awakening (not an easy subject that the filmmaker doesn’t elude, all the while tracing a clear limit between the confused perceptions of a preteen and an adult’s responsibilities). The charisma of the young lead actor plays a big part in the success of a film that proves very illuminating on the desire for emancipation, the new awareness of one’s own identity and the self-limiting obstacles to overcome (social shame) in order to take flight. Samuel Theis stages this floating and porous in-between from Johnny’s point of view throughout, making for a feature that carefully avoids any simplistic black-or-white thinking and vibrates as if to the beats of a heart learning to control itself.

Produced by Avenue B Productions and coproduced by France 3 Cinéma, Softie is sold internationally by Totem Films.

(Translated from French)