It also helps that some of my favourite people are involved in this film: McDonald’s Highway 61 and Dance Me Outside are two of my favourite Canadian films, and Ellen Page continues to impress in every movie I’ve seen her in. But if you can embrace the concept, The Tracey Fragments makes for compelling viewing having seen it once, I want to watch it again to see if the pieces make more sense the second time around. It’s complex, challenging, and at times overwhelming, and as a result The Tracey Fragments will probably put off a lot of people-even people who have been fans of McDonald’s work in the past. Nearly every scene in the film consists of multiple video images, arranged and re-arranged in often-hasty compositions designed to put the viewer inside Tracey’s cluttered, mile-a-minute mind. From that basic foundation, McDonald spins a complex multi-tracked narrative, told largely through an almost-literal kaleidoscope of images that serves as the film’s calling card. One day, Tracey’s kid brother goes missing, and like all teenagers teetering on the brink of emotional collapse, she takes the one action that makes sense: she runs away from home and towards Winnipeg in the hopes that she’ll find her brother. Then rip the tape off and see what happens. The Tracey Fragments has a fairly simple premise: take a fifteen-year-old girl who’s tormented at school, shackled with an ineffectual psychiatrist, and living with a family barely held together with emotional duct tape. Yes, this is my third post regarding a movie starring Ellen Page, but stay with me on this. But Tracey Berkowitz is the anti-Juno: Where Cody Diablo's heroine is insouciant and confidently nonchalant, Tracey is angry, insecure and filled with an unsettling self-loathing, which Page brings to life with a searing immediacy.In the Blog Putting together the puzzle of Tracey Berkowitz But Page's potent performance is the narrative glue: Once again playing an edgy, articulate teenager, it may seem as if Page is fast becoming typecast. But as the fragments of Tracey's story coalesce, we see that her infatuation with Johnny Zero isn't without its own dire consequences.Įven though the screen is often divided into a Mondrian-like grid, each individual box containing its own discreet moving image, McDonald's film is surprisingly fluid and easy to follow: The complex arrangement of frames-within-frames actually allows for more meaning at a given moment, allowing McDonald to operate on a symbolic and literal level at the same time. The only light in Tracey's life is the pallid glow cast by the new kid in school: a black-clad hipster by the name of Johnny Zero (Slim Twig). She's ridiculed by both boys and girls for being flat-chested, and the abuse isn't entirely restricted to mere words. Her mother (Erin McMurtry) is an indifferent, chain-smoking TV addict who divides her contempt equally between husband and daughter and Tracey's life at school is a friendless hell on earth. Her father (Ari Cohen) is an angry, depressive failure whose only apparent power over Tracey is to send her to a psychiatrist (Julian Richings, in drag) while grounding her for months at a time. As a deadly blizzard gathers force, Tracey frantically searches the city, and through bits and pieces of flashbacks - some of which share screen-space with the contemporaneous action as well as figments of Tracey's increasingly fevered imagination - we see Tracey's life, which wasn't terribly rosy even before Sonny disappeared. This time, however, Tracey has boarded the bus with a serious purpose in mind: Her beloved, mentally challenged 9-year-old brother, Sonny (Zie Souwand), is missing, and Tracey knows she's largely responsible. In a sense, the entire film takes place inside the mind of Tracey Berkowitz (Page), a picked-on, put-upon 15-year-old who, wrapped in a bed sheet a la Norman Bates, narrates her story from one of the Winnipeg buses she aimlessly rides when she can't think of anything better to do. The experiment works surprisingly well, thanks in large part to its star, Ellen Page. Scales slice, dice, split and otherwise fragmented the screen into tiny shards and frames within frames in an effort to capture the disintegrating psyche of its heroine: An emotionally distraught Winnipeg high-school student. Cult Canadian director Bruce McDonald's adaptation of Maureen Medved's novel is a bold formalist experiment: After shooting the screenplay - adapted by Medved herself - McDonald and editors Jermiah and Gareth C.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |