Dans Beyond Clueless, un documentaire de 90 minutes, le réalisateur britannique Charlie Lyne revient sur les clichés véhiculés par les teen movies américains. Qui n’a jamais rêvé de conduire la décapotable de Dylan dans Beverly Hills ? Qui n’a jamais rêvé d’avoir le dressing de Cher dans Clueless ? Pour les jeunes européens, la vie des adolescents américains apparaît parfois comme une espèce de rêve, amplifié par bon nombre de clichés et une vision souvent loin d’être objective de la part de l’industrie du cinéma. Pour son premier documentaire, Charlie Lyne s’est penché sur la vision qu’ont les américains de leur jeunesse – souvent dorée. Pour se faire, le réalisateur a monté plus de 200 extraits de teen movies américains (Clueless, 10 bonnes raisons de te larguer, Sexe Intentions…), le tout orchestré par la voix off de l’actrice Fairuza Balk et par une BO composée par Summer Camp. À travers Beyond Clueless, Charlie Lyne nous montre surtout à quel point l’adolescence peut être cruelle, clivante, à travers ses moeurs et ses codes naviguant entre tendresse, perfidie et parfois horreur. En dépoussiérant 10 ans (de 1995 à 2004) de cinéma pour ado, Charlie Lyne titille là où ça fait mal et se débarrasse de la couche sucrée qui enrobe souvent ce type de film. « Vibrant, drôle et subversif » pour Dazed & Confused, « L’un des guides les plus irrésistibles sur le meilleur (et le meilleur du pire) dans les teen movies » pour le New York Magazine, Beyond Clueless a déjà été promu au SXSW, au NIFF, au Festival do Rio, au Hotdocs et au Indie Fest. Sortie en France le 29 avril 2015. SYNOPSIS Narrated by cult teen star Fairuza Balk, Beyond Clueless is a dizzying journey into the mind, body and soul of the teen movie, as seen through the eyes of over 200 modern coming-of- age classics. Part adolescent fever dream, part roving visual essay, the film puts Hollywood’s high school under the microscope, on a quest to lay bare the genre’s beating heart. Is The Craft the ultimate teenage survival guide? Can Idle Hands shine a light on the horrors of pubescence? And what’s really going on beneath the skin of EuroTrip? All will be revealed as Beyond Clueless leads viewers through Hollywood’s treacherous teen years and out the other side. MAKING THE FILM Beyond Clueless was fully funded by more than 500 Kickstarter backers in January 2013, setting in motion a yearlong production process based entirely out of director Charlie Lyne’s bedroom. Some 300 teen movies (on nearly a dozen formats) were closely examined, more than 200 of which made it into the final film. ‘The idea was to construct the film entirely out of other films, using no original footage whatsoever,’ says director Charlie Lyne, ‘so we were presented with the challenge of building an original story with only a few basic elements: film clips; the voice of our incredible narrator Fairuza Balk; and our original music’. Pop duo Summer Camp worked tirelessly to produce the film’s score, which would serve as both a classic pop soundtrack and an instrumental bedrock for the film’s most ambitious sequences. ‘Each bit of music had to serve a very specific emotional arc,’ according to Summer Camp’s Jeremy Warmsley, ‘but beyond that, we had the freedom to take it in any direction we wanted’. Slowly, Beyond Clueless began to take shape, as the filmmakers refined their vision of the movie’s structure and style. ‘We did away with all the talking head interviews and anecdotal stories,’ says producer Anthony Ing, ‘so that all that remained was our universe: the world of the Hollywood teen movie’. Acclaimed illustrator Hattie Stewart came on board at the beginning of 2014 to provide the film’s title design, drawing inspiration from teen movie title sequences and her own teenage sketchbook to create a visual aesthetic all the film’s own. In total, Beyond Clueless was the work of eight individuals — a tight-knit clique of self-professed teen movie obsessives. LAUNCHING THE FILM Beyond Clueless premiered at SXSW in March 2014, as part of the festival’s Visions strand. With zero marketing spend, the film was singled out by publications including New York Magazine, The Guardian, Screen International, Sight & Sound and Indiewire. After a series of sold-out screenings, the film was picked up for distribution in multiple territories. Beyond Clueless has gone on to screen at more than twenty international film festivals, including three of the world’s leading documentary festivals: HotDocs, Sheffield Doc/Fest and CPH:DOX. At HotDocs, the film placed second in the Filmmaker-To-Filmmaker rankings, voted for by participating documentary filmmakers, while at the 27th annual Dallas VideoFest, the film won the Metta Media Award for achievement in documentary filmmaking. Summer Camp have performed their critically acclaimed score live during special screenings of the film staged at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre, London’s BFI Southbank and beyond. Dazed and Confused called their performance ‘the cherry on top of this vibrant, funny and subversive analysis’, while Sight & Sound wrote that ‘Summer Camp’s moody and evocative score elevates the film from intriguing thesis to arthouse mood piece, their twanging guitars and humming synths all the more hypnotic and enveloping at full volume’. Along the way, the filmmakers hosted themed frat parties everywhere from Sheffield to Cannes to Toronto, complete with kegs, beer pong and Summer Camp performing a sparkling set of acoustic covers from classic teen movie soundtracks.