Little Trouble Girls review - masterful debut breathes new life into a girl's sexual awakening

Taking its title from a Sonic Youth track whose lyrics describe someone who seems good on the outside but is bad inside, this debut feature from the Slovenian director Urska Djukic is a small miracle. Its 90 minutes deftly draw us into the psychology of pubescent teens in a fresh, often funny, always transporting way. 

The narrative focuses on Lucia (Jara Sofia Ostan), an introverted, daydreaming 16-year-old who has joined an all-girls choir at her Catholic school. When her mother arrives to collect her from choir practice, it’s clear Lucia is kept on a tight rein. Her mother deplores the lipstick she is wearing, sent by an aunt in Paris, which shy Lucia has been using to ingratiate herself with a trio of more senior girls who spend their time speculating about sex, periods, penises and the like. Her mother is not wholly unkind: later, she and Lucia share ice cream watching television while a man (her father?) snores on the sofa. Perhaps she wants Lucia not to rush into adulthood and a life yoked to a lazy husband, as she herself seems to have done. 

But sex is already on Lucia’s horizon, signalled by a painting of Christ’s wound – looking suspiciously like a vulva – which suddenly appears on the screen, alongside shots of roses whose centres are being probed by visiting bees. Lucia seems to be fascinated by Ana-Maria (Mina Svajger, pictured below, left, with Ostan), the boldest of her new acquaintances; and a three-day choir trip to an Ursuline convent promises broader horizons still. Indeed, as the girls’ bus crosses a bridge into the town – dubbed the Devil’s Bridge by local people, because, myth has it, a virgin was thrown off it as a sacrifice to him –  Lucia glances down and sees a bearded naked man in the river below. Feelings she can’t identify are being set in motion, subtly registering on her impassive face, though the viewer has a pretty good idea what they might be. 

As she plays Truth or Dare later that night with Ana-Maria and the two other senior girls, determined to join in and be accepted, it’s clear their obsession with sex far outstrips hers, so, as a catch-up, they set her the challenge of passionately kissing the most beautiful girl among them. Which she does, an inspired and surprising choice that underlines our sense of her virginal otherness and doesn’t allow for pat assumptions about her. Where her sexual awakening will lead her is not predictable.

The mass hysteria of groups of young girls is familiar territory, from The Crucible to films like Falling and Picnic at Hanging Rock. What makes Djukic’s approach to this material refreshing is her handling of standard directorial techniques. The soundscape plays a significant role, bare of incidental music and relying instead on the choir’s a cappella rehearsals. Found sounds create atmosphere and meaning here: the buzz of insects and rushing of water in the outdoor scenes; the distant chatter of schoolgirls and nuns, the slamming of a faraway door for the interior ones. Cutting across the choir’s singing are the electric saws and hammers of the builders they encounter at the convent, one of them the bearded naked man Lucia saw from the bus: an invasive force with a wider resonance.

Djukic actually opens the film with a sound effect: we see a blank screen accompanied by intense whispering, establishing a sense of naughty secrets shared. These elements are joined gradually by tightly cropped close-ups of a female ear, a mouth chewing, a hand twisting a lock of hair, another texting. This is largely Lucia’s gaze, awakening to the singers in proximity to her and assessing them feature by feature. When she and the girls are made to bend over as a breathing exercise, the camera goes with her and larkily records what she is seeing upside down. It moves so close to its subject that it obliges us to experience Lucia's conflicting emotions, not just observe them.

Djukic is building a sensuous portrait of Lucia with a composite of glances and sighs, in lovely nuanced performances by Ostan. She is a diffident girl, intelligent but timid, as her conductor spots. Her alto voice is faltering, in contrast to the other girls’ confident delivery. Eventually muted by confusion, she becomes a pariah to him, a “little trouble girl”.

Which is to say, she is an outlier, not at ease among the more conventional choir members, who cheerily launch into folkloric songs and practise sibilance exercises that make them hiss and spit. But their singing is strong and moving, however odd they think their conductor is. Lucia tries to convey to him her confusion about Ana-Maria’s apparent feelings for her, when she finds him at the piano playing Bach early one morning, but he merely says Ana-Maria isn’t that kind of girl, and we are left wondering exactly how he knows that.

Where Lucia’s imagination leads her is to visions of Sister Magda and her fellow nuns, women who deny their carnal instincts and channel their passion towards God, and whose sober singing is wonderfully stirring, not least to Lucia. For Ana-Maria, theirs is crazy talk: sex, she argues, is good for releasing endorphins and making people happy. Who will Lucia follow? The narrative literally climaxes with a masterly scene in a toilet cubicle, where all we can see is one of Lucia’s shoulders and her neck, and the soundtrack is all.

Djukic offers no nostrums here. Does the bearded naked man represent a possible future for Lucia, looking as he does like Western depictions of Jesus? Or is he just a tease for the audience, a sexual red herring? Where does Lucia go from here? In a simple, wry coda, the issue is left fruitfully unresolved.

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