Little Trouble Girls
Writer: Urška Djukić
Director: Urška Djukić
Cast: Jara Sofija Ostan, Mina Švajger, Stasa Popovic, Nataša Burger, and Saša Tabaković
Cinema has never been shy about intersecting the eruption of pubescent sexuality with the religious restrictions of Catholicism. Brian DePalma's Carrie is perhaps the cornerstone for that dichotomy. In recent years, the queer religious woman has been a focal point for many filmmakers. Desiree Arkhavan's remarkable The Miseducation of Cameron Post confronted this head on with a young woman inside a conversion therapy camp, while Disobedience from Sebastián Lelio lensed the religious repression of a queer woman from a more mature angle. In the strikingly astute feature debut from Slovenian writer-director Urška Djukić, Little Trouble Girls (Kaj ti je deklica), the antagonism that exists between religion and sexuality is subtly placated as the picture offers an example of potential amicability between the two.
One of the first shots in the modest but sensually plentiful Little Trouble Girls is of lips — vivid, lipstick-red lips that 16-year-old Catholic choir girl protagonist Lucia (Jara Sofija Ostan) is obsessed with. They belong to fellow singer Ana-Maria (Mina Švajger), who captures the attention of the innocent Lucia like pollen would a bumblebee. Lucia is a new arrival to the cliquey choir that she joins, where the gossipy teenage conversations of Ana-Maria and Klara (Stasa Popovic) appear to be new experiences.
It's not directly spoken as canon within the text, but Ostan plays Lucia timidly, as if her school life to that point has been of the strict home-school variety. An early interaction with her mother (Nataša Burger) paints the youngster's home life as loving, if repressed. Lucia is forced to take off the lipstick that her new friends applied to her, as if make-up could indicate perversion of the soul. But once mother and daughter are within the confines of their home, the ice-cream they eat together beneath the glow of television is loving connective tissue between them and humorously anecdotal to many parental relationships.
The story of Little Trouble Girls (whose title is based on the Sonic Youth track that plays across the credits) begins when Lucia's group of catholic teenagers embark on a trip to a large convent in Northern Italy to expand on their choir lessons. For Lucia — whose mercurial sexual impulses flitter wildly around with no direction, nor do they have a sense of internal acceptance for a girl who hasn't had her first period yet — the bus journey provokes sexual curiosity as she witnesses a nude man bathing in a lake. The catholic-raised Lucia doesn't really have a corporeal sense of sexuality; whether that be hetero-, homo-, or bisexuality, as Lucia is confronted by her peer using terms and miscellaneous quirks of girlhood that her upbringing has at this point not permitted her to understand. Her confusion to the much older naked man evoking the same arousal as she has towards Ana-Maria, a girl of her own age, is where Djukić is able to mine that polarity between how sexuality and religious boundaries exist as concepts to young women.Â
This is what makes the picture feel so fresh in a queer film landscape that is insistent on collecting the traumatic experiences of queer folk. Lucia is grappling with the intrinsic carnality of her existence as a human being, but the struggle between this and her religion aren't used for provocation or shame — even amongst a heated exchange with her conductor (Saša Tabaković). A conversation between herself and a nun has such a streak of honesty within it that you could almost believe it was a talking head in a documentary. The nun explains her own decisions around the sexual urges and sins she experiences, guiding Lucia into making a fully conscientious decision around what kind of woman she shall blossom into.
A blooming flower is a prominent image within Djukić's film, as flowers are shown intermittently opening in reaction to rays of light illuminating them. It's a little too common stock for a film that captures this as thematic intent so vivaciously in the text itself. Still, it adds to the light, airy texture of an innocent summer that DOP Lev Predan Kowarski achieves in the film. This textured imagery is often combined with tactile sound design from Julij Zornik, whose work captures the labored breathing of the choir in conjunction with other orally inclined sounds like chewing or the faint sound of lips as they fornicate with clenched fists that might trigger sufferers of misophonia.
Little Trouble Girls captures a luscious summer of sexual emancipation in revitalizing ways. There is a lithe deftness to the film, which doesn't dictate a correct decision for Lucia regarding her sexual affection for women or for men, nor does it admonish the concept of religion. A late scene portrays the consumption of sour grapes as atonement for sins, but this is a film whose rich, thematic wine is far from sour. By its closing moments, Lucia's decision to embrace faith or bisexuality is left tantalizingly ambiguous. This isn't a film about the decision to experience love in the form of sex or faith, but the freedom to choose without the need for penance.Â
