Little Trouble Girls

Jara Sofija Ostan

Urška Djukić's Little Trouble Girls is one of the most promising feature debuts of 2025. This compact Slovenian film tells the story of shy and sheltered Lucija and her sexual and psychological awakening during a summer choir retreat at a convent. A short scene of Lucija riding in a car with her mother displays her repressed background, as her mother expresses her disapproval of girls Lucija age, sixteen, wearing lipstick. Once at the convent retreat, Lucija falls under the spell of the choir's queen bee, the more mature and sophisticated Ana Maria (Mina Svajger). Ana Maria, who would qualify in the US as a mean girl, leads Lucija astray with sapphic come-ons and by urging Lucija to join her in ogling the construction workers toiling at the convent.

Lucija is, at first, intrigued by Ana Maria, but, ultimately, becomes justifiably repulsed by her manipulations. She makes the mistake of tattling on Ana Maria to her choir master (a suitably spineless Saša Tabaković). The conductor treats her not with understanding, but disdain. He reacts by humiliating Lucija in front of the choir, criticizing her, admittedly pinched and hesitant, singing. Lucija becomes persona non grata within her peer group. Director Djukić manages to elicit marvelously unaffected performances from her young cast. She crowds the frame in the interior sequences to suggest the dual nature of adolescent intimacy: both alluring and suffocating. She gives the film a palpable feel of sensuality, foregrounding the throb and heave of bodies. When Lucija masturbates in a bathroom stall, Djukić provides a close-up of her thorax, writhing with forbidden pleasure. When Lucija spies on a particularly hunky worker, Djurkić provides a point of view shot from her perspective of the man's muscular arm, shimmeringly beautifully in the sun. The outdoor sequences in the film, workers toiling at the construction site or bathing in a stream revel in the plein air beauty of natural light.

Jara Sofija Ostan and Mina Svajger: intimacy that is both alluring and suffocating

The role of music in the film also is a clue to the ambivalence with which Djurkić regards beauty, both sacred and profane. Nearly all of the choir's songs are paeans to the Almighty. They are beautiful, yet practiced and rote. True aural beauty is experienced only once in the film by Lucija when she happens upon a sextet of nuns singing in glory to God. The open hearted beauty of their singing reflects the nuns' inner devotion, something the members of the choir cannot approach. This sequence also sets up the extraordinary last shot of the film in which Lucija feeds upon grapes as Sonic Youth perform the gleefully blasphemous song that provides the film's title. Earlier, Ana Maria tells Lucija that they must eat sour grapes as expiation for their sins, but, by film's end, she has been revealed as a false prophet. Lucija, now outside of the web of her sinister peers, can enjoy the fruit and her solitude for their own sake. She may not adhere to the strictures of a holy order, but she has learned that the world is awash in sin. This is something Sonic Youth, no strangers to Catholic guilt, convey also. The key line in the song Little Trouble Girls is "...I'm really bad." Once an individual has accepted that man is born in sin, that knowledge is liberating whether one is seeking expiation or not.