Some filmmakers approach adolescent characters like horticulturalists caring for rare and delicate flowers while others are more akin to researchers practicing vivisection. In “Little Trouble Girls,” the Slovenian director Urska Djukic wavers between these positions, though finally takes a more sympathetic than clinical view of her heroine, Lucia (Jara Sofija Ostan), an unworldly 16 year old who experiences a sexual awakening and, in time, seems to finds a sense of self. Hers is an unsteady transformation, one that’s filled with inchoate longing, fitful self-awareness and confused (confusing) actions that suggest Djukic sees adolescence — and certainly this girl’s — as insistently mysterious, even borderline mystical.
Djukic sets Lucia’s awakening against the backdrop of an all-girls choir that the character has recently joined at her Catholic school. (This is Djukic’s feature directing debut; she wrote the movie with Maria Bohr.) There, Lucia’s gaze almost immediately lands on Ana-Maria (Mina Svajger), a girl with a bright affect and a vividly red-lipsticked mouth. Ana-Maria notices and perhaps because she’s nice or maybe bored or just a garden-variety narcissist, she quickly invites Lucia into her circle. The desire of the other can ignite inner fires, of course, and Lucia’s rapt interest — she looks almost mesmerized — in Ana-Maria lights both of them up.
Djukic builds the story’s tension gradually, in part by contrasting Lucia’s naïveté — often telegraphed by her wide, endlessly surprised eyes — with stylistic flourishes. The opening shot reads like a mission statement and shows what looks like a large vulva on the page of an illustrated manuscript. Although there’s no overt reference to its provenance or explanation of who’s looking at it (other than the amused viewer), the illustration is titled “The Wound of Christ” and is featured in a 14th-century prayer book. (It’s at The Met Cloisters.) For the rest of the movie, Djukic alludes to this overdetermined image with other portal-like visuals, including of flower buds, a bellybutton and numerous shots of the choir’s wide-open mouths.
These images punctuate an otherwise ordinary story that leaps forward with an expedient trip. As a matter of apparent routine, the choir’s male conductor (Sasa Tabakovic) likes to take singers away for “intensive rehearsals” in a countryside convent. There, in the prettily situated nunnery, both in sunlight and in shadow, the girls rehearse, hang out, run free and play truth or dare. They also giggle at some male workers who, as a nun helpfully explains to the visitors, are doing some renovations on the convent. If that sounds intriguing, Djukic further stacks the proverbial deck by having Lucia, Ana-Maria and another girl spy on some of the workers in various states of undress while the men are gathered at a river.
Cloistering hormonally charged girls away from home in quarters where most of the adults are either nuns or big, sweaty men with straining muscles is quite the hothouse setup. Alas, “Little Trouble Girls” isn’t the kind of art-house exploitation movie that it promisingly suggests. Djukic is more high-minded, and what she’s after is a transformational moment in Lucia’s life that she gestures at, letting you connect the dots. Throughout, the filmmaker scatters ideas and images that amplify the story’s milieu and characters, including numerous depictions of the Virgin Mary. One glows in the dark of Lucia’s bedroom; others look out at the world from inside small outdoor shrines, with some placed behind protective bars.
At one point in “Little Trouble Girls,” Djukic changes up the music and the mood by spinning the Sonic Youth song that inspired the movie’s title, a blast of energy that makes a sharp contrast to the more pacific, beautiful older music the girls sing. Djukic is interested in the space, the gap if you will, between the past and the present, the orthodox and the heretical. One problem is that while Lucia is physically attractive and watchable enough, she doesn’t say or do anything of interest other than gaze at Ana-Maria with stunned, finally wearying inexpressiveness. That Ana-Maria is more intriguing by a mile is obvious early on, but she’s also largely a contrivance who exists to stir up Lucia (and the story). Djukic has a fine eye and is a talent to look out for, even if here, like Ana-Maria, she chose the wrong girl.
Little Trouble Girls Not rated. In Slovenian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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