This elegant and mysterious debut from Slovenian director Urška Djukić, with its superb musical score and sound design, reinvents the cliched idea of a Catholic girl’s sexual awakening. It’s also proof, if proof were needed, that no teacher in the world can be as cruel and abusive as a music teacher. We have already seen JK Simmons’ terrifying jazz instructor in Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash and Isabelle Huppert’s keyboard monster in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher; now there is Slovenian actor and musician Saša Tabaković playing a demanding, yet insidious choirmaster in charge of a group of talented, vulnerable teenage girls. The film incidentally has a lesson for any teenage person watching: if a music teacher asks you to sit next to them on the piano stool with no one else in the room and murmurs “You can confide in me” … you can’t.
The English title is taken from Sonic Youth’s Little Trouble Girl, but otherwise this is strictly a matter of holy music. (The Slovenian original is Kaj Ti Je Deklica, which means “what’s wrong with you girl?”). Lucija (played by newcomer Jara Sofija Ostan) is a shy 16-year-old who is a member of her Catholic school’s female choir; with her sexy, worldly, mercurial best friend Ana-Marija (Mina Švajger) she joins the choir’s special trip across the Italian border for a week in Cividale del Friuli near Trieste; they rehearse in a nunnery, a lovely building with a courtyard featuring an olive tree, which is to assume a poetic quality as Lucija gazes at it during sleepless nights.
To the intense irritation of the choirmaster, building work is going on, the noise from which disrupts his rehearsals, and darkens and complicates his mood. The girls look dreamily at the semi-clothed men doing the work, whom they also spy on as they go swimming, and there are many games of spin-the-bottle and truth-or-dare after lights out. The choral sequences of the film are wonderful, and the simple business of rehearsing, of taking music to pieces and putting it back together, is gripping. Tabaković’s choirmaster is brilliant and demanding, with a born musician’s natural severity but, as we are to see, something darker. The film’s sound design is stunning in the sequences when we hear the girls’ breathing exercises which themselves become a kind of eerie choral setpiece that mimics unconscious sexual excitement.
Lucija and Ana-Marija boldly ask a kindly nun, Sister Magda (Saša Pavček) what it is like to do without physical pleasures and she tries honestly to answer that there is fulfilment in sublimating them into devotion to Christ. Is that what is happening with their music? Is that what the film is showing us: that their sexual development is being systematically suppressed, dammed, re-routed into religious music? Or could it be that sexuality is merely the inauthentic, immature version of music?
Then there is the fateful, intimate encounter between the choirmaster and Lucija; he asks her to confide what troubles her, and Lucija rashly gives her an answer that deeply displeases and disappoints him, with awful results. It is then superseded by a kind of epiphany coda, enigmatically taking us forward to the next stage in Lucija’s life. This is an utterly absorbing and outstandingly acted film.
• Little Trouble Girls screened at the Edinburgh film festival and is in UK and Irish cinemas from 29 August.
