Little Trouble Girls: a tale of teen sexuality filled with humour and tenderness

When Lucia (Jara Sofija Ostan) sings – and this is true for all the 16-year-old girls in her Catholic choir – she becomes an attraction. When her voice is cracked by self-doubt, her whole existence feels threatened. Without confidence, teenage identity falters, but desire can bring it back to life. These fluctuations are central to the Slovenian director Urška Djukić’s first feature Little Trouble Girls, as experienced by Lucia, the timid new girl in who is taken under the wing of Ana-Maria (Mina Švajger), the charming queen bee. Lucia joins her hive just in time for the choir’s rehearsal retreat at an Ursuline convent – a perfect place for a girl’s carnal awakening.

Bewitched by Ana-Maria and the status this new friendship brings, Lucia blossoms – her curious eyes light up under her heavy fringe, bright with -affection towards this giggly, mischievous girl and the challenges she poses. But harmony in a girls’ pack demands obedience and observance of hierarchy: Lucia must comply in every respect, from wearing lipstick to provocative games of truth or dare.

One night, Lucia is dared to kiss the most beautiful girl in the convent. Her response is to climb up a broken statue of Virgin Mary and plant a kiss on her marble lips in a sublime act of defiance. Cinematographer Lev Predan Kowarski works with minimal light and deep shadows to capture the scene’s erotic charge: between Ana-Maria’s astonished gaze and what could easily be Lucia’s first kiss, it all feels ethereal, saintly even.

Djukić’s 2021 animated short film Granny’s Sexual Life featured oral histories of Slovenian women recounting their first sexual experiences – underage and violent – in wedlock. The characters of Little Trouble Girls are roughly the same age as the women in those stories, but generations removed, and Djukić is able to flesh out the ambivalences of teen sexuality with humour and tenderness. The script, too, layers these contradictions with empathy whenever the girls speak to one another – mocking the idea that menstruation ‘makes’ one a woman, while also considering sex as a rite of passage. In between rehearsals, they take refuge in the shady nooks of the cloisters and peer at a bunch of construction workers on restoration duty, laughing at their fit, sweating bodies with excitement and a little bit of disgust.

Early in the film, a bus takes the girls across the border from Slovenia to Cividale del Friuli in Italy and over one of the town’s symbols, the so-called ‘Devil’s Bridge’. While Ana-Maria recounts a local legend about its construction, Lucia glances out the window and down to the riverbank to find a naked man looking up at her. She turns away flushed, and it’s  clear that the surprise of male nudity has left a mark. When the nude figure returns, an image that flashes in a fantasy of arousal, it is enhanced by the draw of subjective point-of-view shots – extreme close-ups of open lips and strands of hair fluttering mid-song, in a wondrous sequence.

Lucia and Ana-Maria embody shame and abandon, virtue and sin and the two non-professional actors bring a vivacious rhythm to the roles. Instead of simply pitting them against each other, Little Trouble Girls shows how a strong libidinal bond is formed – with one another and with oneself. “How do you know if something attracts you?” asks Lucia at one point, to which the whole film serves as an answer. She cannot name what is it that surges in her, or maybe she doesn’t want to just yet, relishing her private world. Framed between sharp and shallow focus, Lucia’s sensual discoveries are of no less importance than her vocal training.

Djukić places budding desires and singing side by side, but this all-girl choir movie doesn’t focus heavily on the importance of female voices as such. Other convent choir stories have placed silenced women at their centre, like Margherita Vicario’s period ode to women composers Gloria! (2024), set in early 19th-century Vienna. But Djukić’s debut is grounded in the immediate reality of being a teenage girl. It is not so much about ‘finding your voice’ as learning how to feel, through choked crying breaths and orgasmic sighs alike.

► Little Trouble Girls is in UK cinemas 29 August.