Samuel Theis | Petite nature (Softie) / 2021

different from the others

by Douglas Messerli

 

Samuel Theis (screenwriter and director) Petite nature (Softie) / 2021

 

In the very first scenes of director Samuel Theis’ Petite nature we see an entire family on an overnight move, Sonia (Mélissa Olexa) moving out of her current lover’s house with her young daughter Mélissa (Jade Schwartz), her 10-year-old son Johnny (Aliocha Reinert), and her elder son Dylan (Ilario Gallo). They find someone to move most of their possessions, but with no car these pre-teens. must walk through the streets of the city in which they live, Forbach, in northeastern France, each with treasured objects in hand, Johnny leading with two plastic bags of fish, hurrying forward to get them before they die back into their aquarium.

      The long-haired blond boy Johnny, the “softie” of the title, is a caring and loving child who is sensitive to what most of the family is simply not—in this case even embarrassed to be seen as part of the procession of displaced family on their way to public housing project. The elder pot-smoking teen is interested in his girlfriend (Romande Esch) and his male friends in the project who hang out mostly in a heavily graffiti-covered tunnel, while it is Johnny who must care for his little sister, walking her to and back from school, dressing and even feeding her, and getting the family groceries, while his mother works for a pittance at a cigarette stand and makes out with a series of male lovers we see throughout the movie, coming home many a night drunk.

      She is dependent upon her younger son, and loves him dearly, but laments the fact that he is such a sensitive boy, unable to even stand up to the neighbor boys’ taunting of their pet dog, let alone for himself, a boy with beautiful long hair who openly reads as a “sissy.”

     It is the new school teacher who has moved from a more affluent area of France to the poorer Alsace-Lorraine region who further opens his mind, which leaves him raw in a world which demands being tough and hardy. Here many of the natives even speak another language, a mix of French and German, Franconian, like the people, a mix of heritages that seem always at battle with one another.

      On the very first day of the class, the teacher Mr. Adamski (Antoine Reinartz) asks each of his students to describe where they would like to be in their lives in 30 years, a question unimaginable to most 10-year-olds, but inconceivable to a childlike Johnny. One student would like be in Miami, married with children, another in Dubai making large sums of money, but Johnny is nearly speechless just for nature of the question let alone his natural shyness. Within a few weeks Adamski has begun to open this beautiful child’s mind—the visual and oral evidence of which is one of the many joys of the movie—and Johnny has fallen in love with him, quite literally, obviously realizing far too early that he loves men, particularly when they might serve as the father he hardly ever sees.

       It is notable that at one exasperating moment at home, he suddenly becomes frustrated with his role as a parent in some ways more substantial than his own mother, and suddenly blurts out that he doesn’t want to work in a cigarette stand, he does not at all intend to grow up to become a MacDonald’s manager. 

     At another point, seemingly out of nowhere, Johnny tells his mother that because of their financial situation and his intelligence he might be able to attending boarding school in Metz that Adamski has told him about. But, of course, Johnny’s mother won’t hear of that possibility either, given her need of the boy to raise his sister and keep order in their house.

     Johnny becomes so quickly infatuated with his teacher, that one afternoon he picks up his sister and stakes out Adamski’s house in a fashionable neighborhood, peering into the empty home and, from behind a tree, watching his teacher arrive home with his girlfriend, Nora (French rock singer Izïa Higelin). Arriving home late, Johnny is faced by a distressed mother who, when he refuses to tell her where he was, queries his little sister and finally beats him when he refuses to explain the situation.

     Having been beaten and momentarily forced out of the house, Johnny has no alternative but to actually visit Adamski and Nora. He charms Nora as well, in way that becomes dangerous to the teacher himself, particularly when she invites the boy along with an older girl to an evening open celebration at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, where Nora works. There, among the strong works of contemporary art, he stalks his teacher from room to room, associating Adamski’s interests with his own, at one point even perceiving him, as light pours in from a video installation of an opera house, as being part of the artwork itself. Later, after dinner in a local restaurant, the older girl and Johnny are left alone for a moment to talk, she immediately sensing that he’s “into boys,” and asking him he’s found someone he likes. Johnny admits he has, and agrees that he’s in his school, although he doesn’t believe, he admits, that the friend knows he loves him. Wondering how he can tell, the elder girl suggests he casually touch his body somewhere, his arm and hand, during everyday conversation to see what his reaction might be, and hints at other tricks such as wetting one’s lips to see if the other might be ready for a kiss.

     The boy, however, has his own plan already in mind, a disastrous trip to Adamski’s home during school vacation when he knows that Nora will not be there. He hopes in might be invited in, but when the teacher says he is busy correcting papers and has no time to entertain him, Johnny simply asks to use the bathroom before leaving, and returning to the room in which Adamski is at work, attempts to kiss him before striping off his shirt, seating himself in a chair, and as best as he knows how, tries to seduce his teacher by rubbing his nipple.

      Shocked and rightfully terrified given most of Western contemporary cultures’ hysteria about pedophilia, he demands that he boy immediately dress and hurries him out the door with no niceties or friendliness about it, knowing that if this event ever even got out, he would lose his job. In attempting to help the child, he and his girlfriend have gotten too close.

     It reminds me of the horrible scene in in Norwegian director Gjertrud Bergaust’s 2018 film Jakt (Hunt), where an empathetic farmer has offered a young local bullied gay boy a job, but is suddenly forced to fire him and lock him out of the house when he realizes that he is being set-up for a charge of pederasty.

     Obviously, any 10-year-old is devasted when his idealized teacher must now resist from showing him any special attention, particularly when he has imagined that he was his teacher’s sexual pet. One day during a simple class lesson it as if the trees themselves call out to him as suddenly he attempts to leap from the window of his third-story class room, his fellow students preventing him from the jump.

      The principal attempts to help Johnny’s mother comprehend that such an act requires that he talk to a psychologist, but like many working and rural folks, she is resistant to the idea, fearful that others will think her son is crazy. The principal reminds her that Johnny behaved in this manner in front of his entire class, who themselves will have to be visited by a therapist because of the incident, but she refuses nonetheless. And she demands a further explanation of his behavior afterwards, Johnny dangerously coming close to hinting about his love of the teacher and his belief that he is his teacher’s pet—so close, in fact, that Sonia herself becomes fearful that pedophilia has been involved. But fortunately, Johnny insists that he has never touched him or shown him sexual affection. And being of the working class, she is calmed by his denials.

     The film ends the only way it might, with the man who offered him the world having to remove himself slightly from the boy’s further education. But Johnny nonetheless, like his classmates, takes his first communion, an event attended of necessity by Adamski and Nora, who congratulate him as they do his other classmates. And at the party for him, Nora’s current boyfriend, seeing Johnny apart from the celebrants they’ve invited, pulls him up into his arms and carries him into the room of other males who similarly carry him on above their heads, the perfect kind of love for a boy who so desperately needs but cannot find open expression of male affection.

      As usual, his mother drinks too much, and is carried home drunk by two men, Johnny being forced to undress her and lay her out on the couch, putting a blanket over her passed-out body.

     A moment later he puts his hand around her jaw, as if he would pull her out of her stupor, demanding that she listen: knowing she cannot even hear him, he insists in no uncertain terms that she remember what he says, that he plans to attend the boarding school the next year in Metz.

      Despite everything, this child is determined to get a better education, refusing to become what his family and local society has planned for him. He may be a softie, but he a tough-minded child with the intelligence and desire to be someone, if not more important, at least different from the others—which takes us all the way back to Richard Oswald’s 1919 film wherein a concert violinist makes the mistake of falling in love with his own special student.

     Fortunately, Adamski has not made the same mistake. As Pat Brown of Slant magazine recognizes, while “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, Softie ventures into territory that, with Maïmouna Doucouré’s Cuties, proved to be relatively volatile: the sexuality of marginalized French pre-teens.Rather than teaching a lesson [however] Softie seems much more interested in conveying an experience. Theis proves much more interested in the pain of small mistakes and miscommunications than he is in grand drama. 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.”

      The saddest thing, however, is that open-minded men such as Adamski are forced to keep their hearts in terrible check when it comes to helping the youth of their classrooms. In our society, love is such a confusing force that it must be denied the very individuals who sometimes need it most.

Yet I can imagine that Adamski might have dealt with the child’s torturous farce of love in an entirely different manner, laughing it off while demanding he dress and leave, attempting to make it clear to the boy that there is a vast different between caring for another and a physical expression of love. As it was, Adamski and Nora behaved almost as hysterically as do our general societies in such situations. And had the boy attempted to act out such a rejection in another manner, he might not have been so easily saved.

      But I loved this film, nonetheless, for the child who in the end not only was saved but redeemed himself recognizing perhaps for the first time that despite his gentle assimilation of responsibilities and recognition of the failures of those around him, that he might be someone of greater worth.

 

Los Angeles, March 17, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).