Little Trouble Girls review – monstrous choirmaster spikes a sublime Catholic coming-of-age tale

Utterly absorbing Slovenian debut reinvents the cliched idea of a Catholic girl’s sexual awakening, and proves that no teacher can be as cruel as a music teacher 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” … ...

Michael Haneke films – ranked!

The Austrian auteur has made his name with disturbing and superb studies of the violence and repression of bourgeois life. As he turns 81, we rate his finest films

An early, and relatively minor, Haneke showing 71 “fragments” – or glimpses of apparently unrelated scenes and people – set in present-day Vienna. These involve a security guard, a troubled young man, a depressed retiree and a Romanian illegal immigrant. So what’s tying them all together? The answer is partially given at the beginning and fully at the end, and the movie gives us Haneke’s keynote themes: the nature of violence, urban alienation, the abolition of compassion and community in capitalism and western hypocrisy in primly looking away from injustice and desolation in other parts of the world. But the backstory twist ending – similar to the one Krzysztof Kieślowski in effect gave us the same year in Three Colours Red – is a bit pat.

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