In “Little Trouble Girls,” Urška Djukić makes a girl choir’s weekend retreat into a sweltering crucible. The director’s feature debut is Slovenia’s submission for the 98th Academy Awards and was a hit when it premiered at the 75th Berlin Film Festival, winning the FIPRESCI prize. It’s a profoundly Catholic work, whose slippery sense of sin and living instils great confusion and consternation to those occupying the narrative’s solemn monastery setting.
The film begins with images and sounds that are as fractal as the desires of its protagonist, Lucia (Jara Sofija Ostan). There are extreme close-ups of ears and mouths, ASMR sounds of fingers twirling coarse, long hair, clacking against a smartphone while typing, and a buzzing fly across the ceiling. After those visual and auditory adventures, the camera eventually settles on Lucia’s blank visage. The 16-year-old is a new addition to this choir that includes a self-assured Ana-Maria (Mina Svajger) and her friend Klara (Popovic Stasa). Lucia’s wanting eyes are immediately enamored with Ana-Maria before catching sight of her demanding choirmaster (Sasa Tabakovic). In this opening scene, Lucia possesses a sense of clarity—matched by the overblown ethereal lighting—of who she wishes she was and who she must obey. Djukić, consequently, scrambles those roles; thereby, inspiring Lucia to come of age.
Influenced by Lucrecia Martel’s “The Holy Girl,” Djukić’s film is an exacting portrait of a sexual awakening that offers ample grounding for its protagonist’s frayed psychology. After Lucia’s practice has concluded, for instance, Ana-Maria does the seemingly harmless act of applying lipstick to Lucia. When Lucia’s mother (Natasa Burger) sees the make-up, she is livid: “I thought we’d agreed on no lipstick,” she scolds. Later, in a telling two-shot, a sex scene surprisingly plays as the mother and daughter watch television and eat ice cream. You can probably guess which is transfixed while the other is so uncomfortable they fidget with their robe’s collar. The mother is a total prude. Despite her mother’s sanitized impulses, it’s clear that Lucia is ready to break away.
Life offers the potential for such freedom in the form of three days’ worth of traditional intensive rehearsals at a Cividale monastery. There at the religious site, Lucia occupies a room with Ana-Maria and Katal that overlooks a courtyard where sweaty, burly foreign men are working on repairs. And while Lucia does lust for them, she often hides her desire underneath her quiet expressions. As Lucia, Ostan’s frozen lower face and yet excited eyes frequently recall Botticelli’s paintings, such as “Venus and Mars” or “Portrait of a Young Woman”—figures whose entire worlds unfold across the various corners of their features. Only Ana-Maria is capable of deciphering Lucia’s guarded responses, pushing Lucia’s sensitive instincts in a truth or dare game of spin the bottle or stealing a shirt from a construction worker. “Isn’t it a sin?” asks Lucia. Ana-Maria shrugs, scaffolding for Lucia the kind of adventurousness she’d like to have.
On the religious side, the film is brimming with overt and subtle symbolism. Upon arriving, the girls learn that the monastery’s Mary statue has recently lost its hand, severing it from its connection to God. Two separate montages of flowers being pollinated get the point across, as does the use of sweet and sour grapes, which signify prosperity and accountability, respectively.
The film’s most illustrative scene, however, might be a conversation Ana-Maria and Lucia have with a nun about celibacy. Both prod to see if she ever misses a lover’s embrace, to which she responds that “God’s touch spills over the body.” She takes a deep breath and gathers herself, overcome, possibly, by the love she feels for God. In her, Lucia sees another kind of adoration, the kind that springs up from religious zealotry. And like that nun, Lucia has signed a personal covenant that’s rendered her and her desires invisible.
Similarly, the very act of being in a choir diminishes her, causing Lucia to lose her heart to sing. “If one of you doesn’t conform, it all falls apart,” explains the choirmaster before berating and contorting a lifeless Lucia’s posture. He wants her to look and sound like everyone else, erasing her into a speck against a wall. The only reason we (and Lucia) are not broken is because of Ostan’s lived-in presence, whose rebelliousness is as faithful as a prayer and as sturdy as Djukić’s mesmerizing debut.
