Beyond Clue­less

Beyond Clue­less is the occa­sion­al­ly bewil­der­ing, often beguil­ing debut fea­ture from film­mak­er and jour­nal­ist Char­lie Lyne, whose ded­i­ca­tion to the teen movie cause is not only beyond ques­tion, it could well be med­ical­ly cer­ti­fi­able. His film is many things. Quite lit­er­al­ly, in fact: Lyne spent a year sourc­ing footage from 220 movies from the 1990s to the ear­ly 2000s in order to achieve the full, phan­tas­magoric effect. The end result is an indul­gent curio: a teenage day­dream, an essay film and a cinephile pil­grim­age of sorts.

The film’s great­est secret, how­ev­er, and per­haps its most illic­it thrill, is that it’s not real­ly about teen movies at all. It’s a tes­ta­ment of youth that clev­er­ly hijacks the tropes and trick­ery of teen movies in order to explore the phas­es of ado­les­cence in all their pubes­cent, sex-stained, apoc­a­lyp­tic glo­ry. What’s more, while the chap­ter head­ings sug­gest some kind of qua­si-lit­er­ary struc­ture, Beyond Clue­less is no John Green style fan­ta­sia; rather, the film is a descent into Hell.

It’s sig­nif­i­cant that a num­ber of the clips seem to be mined from hor­ror films, titles like 1998’s Dis­turb­ing Behav­ior and 1997’s I Know What You Did Last Sum­mer. The con­clu­sions aren’t exact­ly pro­found (Idle Hands is about mas­tur­ba­tion, Gin­ger Snaps is about men­stru­a­tion), but the real­i­sa­tion of teen life as sheer, unadul­ter­at­ed hor­ror is a fun and rad­i­cal con­ceit that Lyne grabs by the horns. This demon­ic spir­it is rein­forced by an out­stand­ing orig­i­nal score by Sum­mer Camp: it hums, purrs, rum­bles and shrieks in all the right places.

Lyne’s nar­ra­tor of choice for this macabre chron­i­cle is Fairuza Balk, her­self a teen movie vet­er­an as one of the stars of 1996 witch­craft para­ble The Craft. The open­ing sequence in Beyond Clue­less presents The Craft as a paean to non-con­for­mi­ty, set­ting the tone (stu­dious, aca­d­e­m­ic, maybe just a lit­tle too obvi­ous) for much of what fol­lows. Alas, Balk’s sul­try tim­bre clash­es with the earnest­ness of Lyne’s script, and the nar­ra­tion often ends up sim­ply point­ing out what’s hap­pen­ing on-screen. As a result, some of Beyond Clue­less feels like lis­ten­ing to a Wikipedia entry read aloud by an expert chanteuse.

Hav­ing said that, there’s plen­ty of joy in see­ing this mate­r­i­al pro­ject­ed and reflect­ed in the same place, and the film works best when Lyne’s nat­ur­al irrev­er­ence sneaks in through the cracks. The moment when­he skew­ers 13 Going on 30 is daz­zling­ly on point, while his clin­i­cal dis­mem­ber­ment of both Jeep­ers Creep­ers and EuroTrip (and their respec­tive gay sub­texts) is par­tic­u­lar­ly gratifying.

And the director’s gen­er­al enthu­si­asm for less­er known, under-the-radar fare like Josie and the Pussy­cats and Slap Her, She’s French! (nei­ther of which should ever be screened to a pay­ing audi­ence again) is both admirable and strange­ly infec­tious. Audi­ences could prob­a­bly man­age with­out a sec­ond ​“orgasm” mon­tage, how­ev­er, which is cou­pled with that shot of Dan­ny Dyer indulging in a lit­tle self-reflec­tion in Human Traf­fic. Now that’s real horror.