The Tracey Fragments [Import]

The Tracey Fragments is an intense film. Yes, there is a lot going on on the screen pretty much all the time, but the fact is that if you watch this on a big screen and commit to piecing together the fragments of memory and emotion, this film can be a very rewarding experience. The film provides a window into the mind of a troubled fifteen-year-old girl named Tracey, and so the facts are necessarily disjointed and are colored (sometimes to the point of distortion) by the subject's emotions. I walked out of the theater feeling pretty blown away. The story itself is a powerful one, and the active viewer should experience a kind of slow burn of gradual realization (both about Tracey and the [mostly] poor excuses for people who populate her world) as they gather the scattered pieces of the subject's mind. Then as the film concludes and the viewer is able to assemble all of the pieces into a single image of who, how, and why, the suddenly unified plot makes a sudden and forceful impact. Though less than an hour and a half, the film is packed with at least as much substance as one would find in a conventionally executed 120-minute drama. Tracey is overwhelmed by her circumstances and the degree to which she feels responsible for her brother's disappearance, and the film unfolds with a palpable sense of panicked urgency, thanks in large part to the many rectangles of memory and imagination which populate the screen throughout the course of the film. Ellen Page once again manages to be simultaneously realistic and larger than life as the complex and tragic heroine. This is a film that demands repeated viewings to be fully appreciated. Impatient and passive viewers should steer clear of this film; it wasn't made for them anyway.

A fierce, stark, implosive crawl through the adolescent pscyhe of a tortured 16 year old, inimical to her sorroundings and wrung to desolation by her temerity. Maureen Medved's eerie expose' of a rape victim's fragile self-desecrating self is redrawn by the Canadian author herself, with the complicitous and postmodern applications of director Bruce McDonald. The plot does not cover much ground, but that which it does range over it digs deep within. The warped sense of intimacy that we see Ellen Page's leading character tarry within is portrayed with such a vivid, terrific and terrifying virulence that we see before our very eyes the perils that it promises. The loneliness and alienation is confided to us by the mere strains of personality that Tracey Berkowitz betrays in her gall, a reactive toughnes within which tracey fenced herself while coiling about her the trimmings of a barbed wire.
The movie disorients and bounces, tatters and titters, fidgets in a continuous flourish of images that synchronically and diachronically impose themselves on the screen in adjecent, fading and overlapping fragments. The pattern of the narrative is sporadic and laden with the logic of a psyche that cannot make sense of what it is suffering, as much as it caves within this same pain for fear that anger and madness have the best of her. How stirring to watch the most talented young artist working today engaged in a production of such an entrancing livid urgency. Ellen Page shows us here why she may very well be the best ever. Yes I said it, she is that good. Incredibly so; and if she was showered with awards and applause for Juno, here she deserve nothing short of awe.
The movie differs in elemental ways from the novel it adopts its script from. The blizzard, the rape scene and the ridicule Tracey is subject to at school is dealt with in a very different reality. It actually adds a dimension to the narrative. Musings and dreamy aspirations are thwarted and tentaizingly strewn about the screen to echo the thoughts of a girl who is gearing to meet her fate as if by choice. Her parents are more sympathetic but insensitive and disruptive, if not altogether psychologically and emotionally violent all the same. The performences of Ari Cohen and Julian Richings are compelling, animated and free of the predicament of being cast in roles of such a perforating indiffference. Thinkfilms takes a risk in this production, for the topic of adolescent rape is somewhat of a taboo, especially if depicted in such realist and matter-of fact terms. The psychology is drawn about with bursts of anger and surreal sessions with a stone-faced therapist that in a void of whiteness delivers an insatiable array of innuendos, particles of a methodology that arrests its purpose as it seems incapable of offering a dialogue to a tormented mind. The soliloquies and voice-overs of the leading character are effective and demonstrative, often slurring through the scenes and designating a tentative memory double guessing itself. The frustration of being tit-less, an "it" according to her classmates, is a wound inflicted on Tracey too debilitating for even her feigned callousness. She carries herself as if burping lava sliming along announcing the eruption that never happens full force. A throttle that will release tension in a rape scene where she fantasizes she is making love with her boyfriend. She will at a later time while addressing us, on a bus running from reality, even claim that her rapist was actually her lover, several frames before we come to fully realize the truth of things. She insists that he "put his c*** in me and then said I love you, exactly in that order." How painful to recall that phrase. She is fearless indeed, but the tenderness is so pervasive we want to reach out to her and embrace her with a tight hold that may provoke her to at least surmise as possible that someone cares about her. The fragments of the story are shuffled with the overriding narrative of Tracey's brother Sonny's absence. She tells us she has not so much as run away as gone to retrieve her brother. This may function as an allegorical device if we run that route. Sonny disappears in conjunction with the rape scene, which I must add is innocent in its graphic covertness, but more powerful because of it. Do not have a minor watch this movie! It is too much even for mature audiences. But if art is a means to insights this movie succeeds admirably. It is a viewing that will haunt you more than any horror flick could ever wish to.The emotional starkness inscribes a feel of verisimilitude that is quite unique. The language is rouch and vulgar, but necessarily so. The psyche of a tortured, violated, thwarted and crushed adolescent girl is rendered in shattered pieces the spectator will be left picking through in an attempt to satisfy the fragility we are left with upon finishing the movie.
It is one of the most exceptional movies ever made, one that deploys postmodern language in a way that is not pretentious or ineffectual. It hits the spot, problem is that it leaves a deep wound where it hits.

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Before her "Juno" fame Ellen Page was willing to take all kinds of chances as she followed the career path of Thora Birch from mainstream family entertainment to more cutting edge stuff. "The Tracey Fragments" (2007) was her last film before "Juno" and was like appearing in somebody's limited budget student film. Imagine your basic ahead of the curve student writing a somewhat "bent" screenplay, an inexperienced director turning Page loose to interpret her character without the help of acting for the camera direction, and the entire film class piling into the computer lab to slice and dice the thing in post-production hoping that thousands of hours of digital editing can add some value to the minimalist production.

If the idea sounds like fun it probably was; and the end product should please its narrow target audience of film buffs, Page fans, and assorted off-kilter types. "The Tracey Fragments" is a blend of "Ghost World" (2001) and "Gummo" (1997), imagine a dumbed-down Enid (Birch) transplanted to Xenia, Ohio.

This coming-of-age story is self-indulgent; with a screenplay chock full of symbolism, a chopped up time-line, and frame-in-frame effects (can you say "fragments") that call attention to themselves. But in this case it is not a bad thing; if you don't find the whole package entertaining you can just focus on the inventive style and on what it tells you about film theory and how viewers expect to read a film.

Tracey Berkowitz (the slack-jawed title character) has a secret. She seems to have misplaced her little brother Sonny and the film elliptically reveals the story of Sonny's disappearance and Tracey's miserable existance; with the disparate story fragments connected by her odyssey around town in a bus. But film conventions are not followed and it is impossible to tell which segments are real and which ones are figments of Tracey's imagination. Ultimately the viewer is left to wonder if there ever was a Sonny; that he may simply represent Tracey's loss-of-innocence in what may otherwise be a very traditional coming-of-age tale. By the end we see that her coping mechanism seems to have worked and they go out on a character who probably has come to terms with her reluctant nudge into an adult world; a world that she already finds disappointing but one which will be tolerable because of her low expectations.

Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.