gemko

Little Trouble Girls (2025, Urška Djukić)

Added 2025-12-04 23:05:29 +0000 UTC

57/100

Dirty pool to have my standard walk-out point (at ⅓ of total runtime) fall just as the choirgirls’ game of Truth or Dare is heating up. (Dared to kiss the prettiest girl in the convent—that’s where they’re rehearsing, for no terribly good reason other than amping up sacred v. profane—our bashful, anxious protagonist winds up planting one on a statue of the Virgin Mary.) Well before that point, it had become abundantly clear that Little Trouble Girls (yes, we hear the Sonic Youth song) wasn’t gonna deviate from a bog-standard sexual-awakening template, subdivision Oh Maybe I’m Queer? (though I’d still file Lucia under Indeterminate as the end credits roll); not one narrative element feels fresh, except maybe introducing a cartoonishly restrictive mother and then immediately transplanting the story elsewhere so that we never see or hear from her again. (She’s just meant to “explain” Lucia’s timidity.) Yet I stuck with it, partly because I’ve seen virtually no Slovenian films (this might be my first since Guardian of the Frontier in ND/NF 2003), but mostly because Djukić’s direction is so supple and the two central performances (or three, I’ll throw in the choirmaster) are just exquisite. Manohla Dargis carps that we’ve been allied with the wrong girl, and Mina Švajger, playing a self-confident object of curiosity and/or desire, evinces a seductively dangerous charisma not unlike Lou de Laâge’s in Breathe, minus the deliberate cruelty. But that character archetype needs something to disrupt, and first-timer Jara Sofija Ostan embodies just the right sort of tremulous wariness. They’re perfect together—so much so that their eventual “breakup” feels manufactured. Anyway, I knew my overall reaction would be mixed, but it’s hard to bail on a filmmaker who orchestrates extended choir scenes with such dynamic assurance, or whose choice of angle for a girl masturbating is close on her neck, thrown back so that the horns of the hyoid bone resemble open thrusting legs as she heavily breathes. A promising debut.