Mother Mary comes to me: The sensuous renaissance of Little Trouble Girls

Sensual, sexual, or sensuous: How does one capture different types of sensory-based experience in an exclusively audiovisual medium? One method might be to try to evoke in the audience the same feelings as the characters are experiencing. The emotions of fear, arousal, and sadness may include both a physiological and psychological component and can be incited in a viewer through a combination of audio and visual stimuli. In her debut feature, the Berlinale Perspectives opening film Little Trouble Girls (Kaj ti je deklica), Urška Djukić offers that sensory-based experiences can be conveyed through a more metaphorical sensibility through the use of motifs, disruption of archetypical character journeys, and reframing of “sexuality” into “sensuality”. The writer-director provokes the idea of different sensuous experiences through a variety of techniques that avoid more traditional methods of mirroring what characters onscreen are directly feeling.

“People who are deeply connected to their bodies are not easily led, as they trust their inner intuitive guidance more than external influences,” says Djukić. She suggests to us that perhaps the more interesting concept is the sensuous aspect rather than the sexual one: something tied to an embodied experience that is not burdened by the expectations around sex and sexuality. In some cases, character feelings are also of unconventional origins, such as emotions and reactions that are felt in the flesh but are from sources that are difficult to grasp empirically, such as emotions associated with the divine and transcendental. Others might be tied to personal transformation and corporeal sensations that remind us of our own bodily existence. How, for instance, might you holistically convey to a viewer the feeling of religious enlightenment or a character being touched by God?

While the themes in Little Trouble Girls are multifold even over its brief 90-minute runtime, the premise is decidedly simple: The introverted 16-year-old Lucija (Jara Sofija Ostan) is intrigued by the confident older student Ana-Marija (Mina Švajger), and they grow closer during a choir retreat to a monastery in the Italian countryside. The latter challenges the former’s ideas about womanhood, just as Lucija makes discoveries about herself when she becomes fixated on a male restoration worker doing construction at the monastery. Below, I break down the film through a three-part exploration of what I see as its most important aspects loosely tied to aspects of the sensuous, each led by a quote from an interview with the filmmaker; each part also incorporates other quotes from the same interview.

In which we no longer come of-age

“It is about much more than just a coming-of-age film. It’s a film about the mysteries of senses and exploring the body and the world through them.”

Although Djukić concedes to the “coming-of-age” label assigned by the industry because of its themes, she doesn’t want you to see Little Trouble Girls as a coming-of-age film. She makes porous the boundary and binary between girlhood and womanhood, refusing both a category and a straightforward journey for our protagonist. This is brought up early on in the film, when Lucija and her newfound friend group of chatty older students, including Ana-Marija, begin to engage in a conversation around menstruation; one is convinced that it marks one’s entrance into womanhood. However, our protagonist is 16 and has not yet had her first period yet.

What Kathryn Bond Stockton (an academic with a multifaceted background, notably, in psychology, philosophy, and divinity studies) calls “growing sideways” refers to fictional depictions of individuals that defy linearity. She argues that this, more often than not, depicts the growth of children far more accurately than a linear model. Stockton uses the phrase, “to be queered”, loosely—such as a child queered by adult fixations on innocence or money, for instance, in ways that influence sexual value systems beyond the idea of sexuality as a sexual gender preference. Some analyses refer to the concept of growing sideways to speak about Céline Sciamma’s debut film Water Lilies, whose two protagonists, in some ways, mirror those in Djukić’s film: an introverted girl exploring the world around her while trapped in the alluring circle of a more popular peer, leading to newfound sensuous discoveries as well as social conflict. 

Lucija’s path undoubtedly follows a non-linear trajectory, where she has at least two sources of personal fascination in Ana-Marija and the unnamed restoration worker. She could be seen as being queered by religion: she is cautious in her actions and thinks thoroughly about the societal discourses given to her around sexuality and behavioural ethics in all aspects of life. Conversely, Ana-Marija is repeatedly sceptical of this idea, taking a more hedonistic approach. Djukić doesn’t necessarily condemn this, but she instead shows how the older girl’s line of thinking is more linearly oriented. She sees Lucija’s winding path as wholeheartedly independent of what we project upon her—that perhaps she desires Ana-Marija or that she wants something from her—“Lucija is drawn to something she does not yet understand, and she is attracted to the path she must take for her personal growth.” We, in turn, are the ones assuming what will happen along her journey.

Embedded in Stockton’s approach is a move against the heteronormative image of a white-picket-fenced life and a crucial moment that often involves a so-called loss of virginity, particularly for a young woman. Djukić does not grant us this archetypical moment: instead, one of the film’s crucial scenes is of Lucija masturbating, a freeing and graciously self-indulgent act focused on herself and not on the social norms that suggest she must have sex with a man in order to “become” a woman. Through what a colleague of mine calls “short-story anatomy”, the director further leaves the story open-ended, never creating a full closing chapter for Lucija’s exploration. This is another bold choice that disrupts the coming-of-age formula, where a specific outcome, realisation, or conclusion is made by the film’s protagonist. Rather, the last scene offers a brief and profound call-back to an earlier sequence, as if framing the film as a recollection, even if we don’t know what decisions Lucija has made since. This implores the viewer to think about the possibilities that remain and the journey taken, erring us toward the contemplation of experience rather than as a set of personality traits.

Eating the forbidden fruit

“I believe that the body has its own instinctual intelligence that guides us—if only we knew how to listen to it.”

From the start of Little Trouble Girls, the film’s primary sensory conduit emerges as stemming from a concept of “orality”, which is innately tied to the coming and going of Lucija’s agency as she grows through the film. Orality holds the dual meaning of reliance on verbal expression as well as, from a psychoanalytical standpoint, the aspects of sexual experience centred around the mouth. In holding both of these meanings close, Djukić reunites us with a bodily, corporeal experience rather than one that is solely intellectually and rationally driven. Before we see any images, we hear the sound of deep breathing, echoing resoundingly in our ears—in and out, in and out—which we can easily read as the breaths of the girls’ choir; later on, its meaning is redefined in the masturbation scene. The film’s sound design is further filled with heavily aspirated whispered phrases, neither ASMR nor an attempt to create erotic dialogue, but instead as if being carried to Lucija and the viewer-slash-listener by a godly breeze.

The opening scene introduces us to Lucija in the girls’ choir, but the first time she opens her mouth to articulate, it’s to sing, not to speak. Immediately before, she turns and lays eyes on Ana-Marija, who is wearing matte red lipstick; Lucija casts the briefest of gazes on her face and later sees her blush-red lips in a dream. Before the choir begins its vocal exercises, she discreetly licks her lips—as if not simply in preparation for the choir’s vocal exercises, but also as an instinctual response to the lipstick. The iterations of orality transmogrify over the course of the film: later in that same sequence, Lucija meets Ana-Marija officially after the rehearsal. “Cool lipstick,” Lucija says, then pulling out her own special red lipstick that her aunt bought in Paris to show. Ana-Marija applies it to the younger girl’s lips with the gentle stroke of her index finger.

At this point, we are unable to fully read what Lucija makes of Ana-Marija, but clearly, something intrigues her. Despite the innocence of this gesture between teens, its transgressive and more overtly sensuous side is quickly revealed as we witness the horror from Lucija’s mother when she sees her daughter. She reacts as if the teen has dirtied herself, both physically and spiritually: “You’re too young… Do you think you can do anything you like?” The mother-daughter pair’s reparative act of orality is considerably more tame: the late-night consumption of ice cream, straight from the container—each with their own spoon—and into their mouths.

After the group arrives at the monastery, Lucija’s opportunities for exploration explode, just as the director’s use of music grows more emotively liberal, inserting longer choral sequences where we can hear the songs themselves. In one rehearsal, Djukić intercuts extreme close-ups of the lips of various choir members, all distinct, just as the focus of the film sound pings from voice to voice. We immediately become acutely aware of both the appearance of each mouth—the sharpness of certain canines, a wide-toothed grin, braces for another, the flicking of a tongue—as well as the melodic sound emerging, all with different timbres. We are practically called to play a game of visual association, where the mouths evoke the images we know of Ana-Marija’s gap teeth and Lucija’s timid smile. Here, orality takes on its communicative form: spoken words become those vocalised in song and are felt rather than understood through a rational frame. This may be a choir, but each young woman’s voice is unique.

Djukić says that the idea of a focus on orality came when she heard a Slovenian Catholic girls’ choir and felt moved to tears during a concert, citing “the intensely powerful force of young female voices” as an influence on the film. The music of Little Trouble Girls makes the director’s experience easy to understand as audiences are privy to the simultaneously angelic, haunting, and sublime feeling of listening to choral music. Through this avenue, she says she “started focusing on senses and on the body, and how we experience life through it”, with the understanding that “women’s voices are heavily silenced in a patriarchal environment”. Although not free entirely from a patriarchal grip, the nuns’ monastery is thus the best-case place where the girls are seemingly free to express themselves as they wish through different forms of verbal expression.

At the film’s one-third mark, Ana-Marija convinces Lucija to eat a sour green grape picked from a vine—a religious reference in and of itself—coolly telling her that it’s a way to atone for sins. But as Lucija grimaces and moves to spit it out, Ana-Marija forces her to swallow the fruit: “If you don’t suffer, it won’t work,” she says seriously. In contrast to the film’s opening lipstick interaction, where the older girl has “sullied” the purity of the younger girl, this oral act thus becomes one symbolic of cleansing—even if it is derived for Ana-Marija’s amusement, where she uses the power of her own verbal expression to mislead. A truth-or-dare sequence at the film’s halfway point leads Lucija to tenderly kiss the convent’s statue of the Virgin Mary in a transcendent backlit scene, as if we are entering a different realm. Lucija’s assertion of agency is where the characters’ gazes are reversed. Rather than her watching Ana-Marija, it is now Ana-Marija who stares up at the younger girl, mouth slightly agape before closing her lips, as if making an internal decision of her own. In this moment, Lucija seems to move from unconscious exploration into slowly taking back her agency, which was formerly guided by Ana-Marija’s wishes.

Next, two girls practice kissing their own clenched hands (the film’s seemingly cryptic poster image) before Ana-Marija leads Lucija into kissing her, leaning forward assertively. After both draw away, it is the latter who leans in to reinitiate. When a branch cracks loudly, revealing the presence of the restoration worker watching them make out, they suddenly draw away from each other. In the moments following, Ana-Marija subtly looks to Lucija’s lips, while Lucija herself is fixated on the worker walking into the distance; the role reversal continues here. But later on, when Ana-Marija makes fun of one of the nun’s beliefs and then aggressively leans in to kiss Lucija again, Lucija pushes her away angrily. Here, she rejects the assertion and ruse, hidden under a false façade of knowledge, experience, and sexual maturity. In this moment, she both loses and takes back her voice simultaneously, a transformative moment untethered from a more conventional sexual experience.

After this incident, where Ana-Marija has effectively taken on a patriarchal role, it is as if Lucija has lost her voice; she struggles to sing or vocalise at all in choir rehearsals. In response, their male conductor rages at her, repeatedly yelling at her to sing, even when she has no strength. This becomes a fitting metaphor for the silencing of women’s voices and the parallel command for women to express themselves unwillingly and for the male gaze, like being told by a man on the street to smile. Djukić sums it up: “Throughout history, women’s voices have been silenced so much, and I believe that expressing oneself through voice remains a challenge for many women even today.”

The sensuous and the sublime

“Perhaps you are attracted to something someone has that you do not, but you wish to possess—this, too, is sexual energy.”

The concept of orality is also a gateway into other forms of sensual experience in the film; Lucija first observes, then she obsesses, often on aspects of the corporeal. The aforementioned heavy breathing sound from the start of the film can be reread later in the film through the experience frame of Lucija, who exhales raggedly while masturbating in the bathroom after a tense but dialogue-free confrontation with the restoration worker. Djukić says that for this scene, she and the director of photography, Lev Predan Kowarski, chose to fix the camera in the room with Jara Sofija Ostan in the space by herself in order to “truly create an intimate atmosphere”. The direction of this scene focuses exclusively on Lucija’s face and torso, while the implicit movement of her body implies the act itself. This set of choices breaks free this moment from many of its normative assumptions, training us to think about the liberatory nature of sensual pleasure—of Lucija’s orgasm as perhaps experience of the sublime, of sublime discovery capable in every place.

We see Lucija fixated on the muscles of the restoration worker in one moment and the swing of Ana-Marija’s hips in another, where there is no true boundary between the experiences of the flow of energy, as Djukić puts it. She blurs the line between different forms of attraction and admirably refuses to establish definitions: “I wanted to play with informal rules and question them in the sense that sexual energy is not rigidly tied to the presence of a man or a woman on the other side, but rather that this is life energy that can be felt in many places.” This is also conveyed in the film’s dialogue, where one of the nuns explains how she redirects the intense corporeal energy she sometimes feels into a connection to God, an idea that Lucija entertains and is curious about.

Little Trouble Girls thematically unites the corporeal and the divine; the feeling that Djukić describes having experienced when listening to the girls’ choir can be seen as another way of what philosophers have likened to the sublime. The experience of “frisson”—those psychogenic shivers down your back—is but a corporeal manifestation of such, of the metaphysical and the spiritual as felt in the body. The director shows us that not everything has to be vocalised in order to be understood; some things are better left felt in the flesh. Maybe in film, too, we should be encouraged to use the medium to understand the many sensuous aspects of our world much more freely.

Olivia Popp
©FIPRESCI 2025