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” … 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.

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