The Forbidden Voice of Adolescence

The discovery of the other in a delicate and sensitive film

Laboured, laboured breathing. In close-up, a highly sensual artistic image, unforgettable and iconic. A gaze that opens up to the world. Fearful and curious at the same time. There could not have been a more disturbing start to “Perspectives”, the new section of the Berlinale dedicated to debuting directors which opened with Little Trouble Girls (Kaj ti je deklica) by Urška Djukić, a Slovenian-Italian film, shot between Ljubljana in Slovenia and Cividale del Friuli in Italy.

Lucia (newcomer Jara Sofija Ostan) is sixteen years old. She sings in a choir and that is probably the only window that the girl, crushed by her mother’s conservative and Catholic education, can open onto the world of adolescence: her first turmoil, the first gloss furtively applied to her lips, the first butterflies in her stomach. The great opportunity is the summer seminar in Cividale: three days with the choir mates away from the family together with the maestro to best prepare for the final concert. Urška Djukić demonstrates that she has seen and assimilated a lot of adolescent cinema, especially Picnic at Hanging Rock, a 1975 Australian mystery film by Peter Weir. His shot of the girls lying on the stones of Natisone during an excursion together with a nun is even recalled in the arrangement of the young people on the bare stones. The atmosphere is immediately pervaded by that sense of mystery and boundary that characterised Weir’s film. Hand in hand with the music that Lucia must bring out from herself, her doubts and her disturbances also emerge from the girl. She has been frozen by the education she has received so far and is totally unprepared for what could happen to her in contact with peers who are more confident with their sexuality and the changes in their body. In this sense, Lucia always seems alone, even when her friendship with the disturbing Ana-Maria brings her a little closer to the others and removes the veneer of the strangest and most distant peers. Alone, Lucia tries to defend herself as best she can from what is about to come upon her: a night when a game of spin-the-bottle commands her to kiss someone, she runs to the statue of the Virgin Mary to honour her debt. But desire makes its way inside her and the meeting with one of the workers who is fixing the cloister that houses the young people will make impulses explode that until then have been kept buried.

The director knows how to direct the young actresses; she knows how to make them go through doubts and uncertainties. And she takes the game of Lucia’s desires to extreme consequences, to the point of reaching heights of disorientation that could be fatal to the young girl. What will happen next? The last scene seems to tell us a lot about Lucia’s future, but the director chooses to leave this open to the spectator’s imagination. A risky but courageous choice, which demonstrates a character and talent that bodes well for the future.

Sara D’Ascenzo
Edited by Birgit Beumers
©FIPRESCI