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

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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” … ...
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The Whisper of Silence review – coffee-taster drama makes most of stunning locations

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Alfonso Quijada’s feature follows a young woman gifted with an extraordinary sense of smell. It looks great, but fails to satisfy

This drama from El Salvador has several commendable features, starting with a tender, sympathetic central performance from Laura Osma as Josefina, a sweet young woman who discovers she has an exceptional sense of smell. However, something doesn’t quite smell right about the way the film clumsily layers uplift and violence, served up with excessively stylised visuals and sound. It’s as if writer-director Alfonso Quijada, better known hitherto as an actor and producer, doesn’t know if he wants to make a telenovela-style melodrama or something more elevated and arty – in the tradition of Claudia Llosa’s The Milk of Sorrow or Lila Avilés’s films The Chambermaid and Tótem – with long takes and oblique storytelling strategies. In the end, it fails to satisfy either ambition.

Josefina and her younger brother Alfredo (William Castillo) lost their mother not long ago and seem to have no father in the picture; they live with their godmother in a rural part of El Salvador. Josefina picks coffee on an estate owned by Don Villagran (Boris Barraza) while Alfredo is supposed to be going to school. However, he has taken to bunking off with some bad boys, as Josefina’s friend Dalia (Emy Mena) describes them.

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