Sounds Like Teen Spirit

If you’ve never heard of the Junior Eurovision Song Contest, don’t worry; you’re in good company. It may well be celebrating its sixth year and command a TV audience of 23 million, but let’s face it – none of those viewers are British. Because this is Europe’s cheesiest festival, a spin off of that monument to national spite, where underage entrants write songs about love and hope only to be dispatched like cannon fodder into a no man’s land of commercial cynicism. The Eurovision Somme Contest, more like.

Thanks to a mixture of innate scepticism, triumphant xenophobia and a finely honed nose for European bullshit, we’ve kept Our Boys (and Girls) well clear of this federalist masquerade. But one brave filmmaker has entered the breach, going behind the scenes of the 2007 competition to expose the whole event as the corporate sham of childhood-ending hypocrisy it so obviously is.

Only, here’s the twist: it’s not. Sounds Like Teen Spirit is, in fact, a celebratory snapshot of youthful optimism, brimful of warmth, humanity and a simple, charming honesty. It’s the most intoxicating thing to emerge from Eurovision since Cheryl Baker’s legs.

Much of the credit for that must go to director Jamie Jay Johnson. It’s his curiosity and affection, not so much for the competition but for the kids themselves, that provides the film with its beating heart. He follows four acts from national finals to big night, and you can’t help but root for all of them.

There’s Trüst from Belgium, a quartet that includes Laurens, a gangly clown who, at 15, is at the upper limit of the contest’s age range. In Georgia we meet Mariam, a young girl with the air of an adult whose difficult life is betrayed by the bullet-scarred walls of her home. Marina is a 14-your-old Bulgarian, beautiful, popular and rich, who hopes that her dad will see her on television and come home. And there’s Giorgos, a 10-year-old Cypriot. Bullied at school, he hopes to prove something to himself through the contest.

But it’s not how it sounds. This isn’t a heart-warming tale of struggle against the odds; it’s not about the uneasy integration of Europe, or the schism between rich and poor; it’s not about the ethics of competition or beauty pageant perversity; it’s not about pushy parents or national pride. All these ideas are floating around the ether of Johnson’s film, but at its core, it’s something much more compelling and universal.

Sounds Like Teen Spirit is a film about the simple pleasures – and exquisite pain – of childhood. But where childhood in cinema is so often something to be shrugged off – a way station on the road to somewhere better – here, Johnson asks us to recognise the preciousness of childhood for its own sake; for that brief point when innocence and sincerity coalesce to create something that, as cheesy and uncool and ‘Eurovision’ as it sounds, is beautiful.

For all that the film is shot with a wry sense of absurdity, Johnson doesn’t mock or judge these kids. And while he might have chosen his subjects because they echo movie archetypes, they’re recognisable as people. These aren’t the ‘loveable losers’ of Spellbound, or the high-school zombies of American Teen. They’re normal kids, captured at a point of transition to uncertain maturity, acting and speaking in ways that are more truthful and funny and affecting than a scripted movie could hope to be.

Sounds Like Teen Spirit is a joyously populist piece of filmmaking that wears its heart on its sleeve. Johnson has managed to articulate something simple but profound in a shamelessly uplifting documentary that never resorts to manipulation to tug the heartstrings. And as for Junior Eurovision – who’s up for a British entry next year?

Matt Bochenski

Anticipation:

A documentary about Junior Eurovision? Set the irony alert to DEFCON 1

Enjoyment:

An exquisitely poignant, hilarious and uplifting reminder of the power of music, and cinema, to enrich your life.

In Retrospect:

Perhaps Johnson could have asked more determined questions about the nature of the competition, but that’s a minor quibble.