The Tracey Fragments

Plot synopsis:
Because this film is literally a spliced collage of various film fragments in no particular order, it is difficult to give a full synopsis, but there is a story to it all.Fifteen-year -old Tracy Birkowitz is a caustic, sarcastic, vulgar and spoiled teenager, living in Toronto, Canada with her well-meaning but often verbally abusive, workaholic parents. Bullied in school, her day-to-day environment has obviously influenced her behavior. The film starts off with her riding the bus, giving a monologue, and film fragments are shown that depict her parents yelling harshly at her that if she isn't careful, she will be raped and murdered. It then shows her locked in a room, presumably a police station, and then it shows her parents again, shouting that they want to know where their son is.Tracy is responsible for losing her little brother, Sonny, a mentally-disabled boy who acts like a dog. As she says, he has disappeared without a trace, and he has never come back. She has run away from home herself and has become more or less a hobo.Much of the film is then taken up with Tracy's everyday world of riding the bus repeatedly, looking every day for her little brother. She avoids school and home, and when she does show up to school, her teachers turn a blind eye to her peculiar behavior. Her classmates dub her "the titless wonder", much to her annoyance. She tries to call home on a payphone and cries out for her mother, to no avail, eventually smashing the phone booth in rage. She also rescues a disheveled woman a little older than she is after she is kicked off the bus.Before Sonny disappeared, a fragment from earlier times is shown in which Tracy meets her one and only friend, Billy Zero, an enigmatic high-schooler who dresses in all black grunge and dates her briefly. Tracy loves him much more than Billy loves her, and from other fragments, it soon becomes apparent that although Billy likes Tracy, he is only interested in sex and that he doesn't have any real profound love for her. Tracy's fantasy is to be in a metal band with Billy under her imagined stage name, Estuary Palomino.As the film progresses, it is shown that Tracy's manly female psychiatrist is very little help to Tracy, and believes nothing she says, wanting her medicated. It is also revealed that Tracy has borderline personality disorder. Both her and Sonny, having grown up in a broken home, are troubled but too afraid to say why. Sonny's bizarre dog behavior, Tracy believes is her fault because "I hypnotized him to be a dog from now on", but it soon becomes apparent that Sonny might have been acting out and had run away from home to escape his overbearing family, especially since there is no real proof that he's mentally challenged. There is some implied past affair between the parents of the Berkowitz family, and that Sonny might be either adopted, or another woman's child after her father had an affair, as seen in a flashback where Tracy's dad tells her as a young child about Sonny's ambiguous origin, claiming that he once had a mother who loved him very much, and spinning some imaginary story about dogs and Eskimos. It is never made clear what exactly happened to Sonny in the past.Tracy is shown spending time on the streets and in the homes of a number of people who she thinks are her friends, mostly hipsters and junkies with similar lives to hers and not a lot of money or emotional support. Tracy witnesses physical violence, drug use, sex and booze in her new environment. Seeking out her psychiatrist for help in finding Sonny proves to not be useful at all, and since she has run away from home herself, she becomes worried that adults will prevent her from her search for Sonny. When Tracy is nearly raped in one of the apartments she is spending the night in, she escapes wearing no clothes, just a shower curtain around her shoulders. She then gets back on her favorite city bus.It is finally revealed how Tracy lost Sonny in a small flashback. Tracy obsesses over her body image because of her breast size, spending a lot of the film comparing hers to that of the other girls around her. Because of this, she thinks no guy will ever truly love her, nobody at all for that matter, because the only person who has ever shown her not sex but real friendship, was Sonny. Billy Zero gives her the sexual attention she desires, but her parents ground her to her room, jeopardizing her relationship with Billy. Thus, under the guise of "taking Sonny for a walk", she sneaks outside to meet Billy and have sex in the back of a car, leaving Sonny alone for what she thinks is only a few minutes. Before she knows what has happened, hours have slipped away from her - and so has Sonny.A final fragment shows Tracy wandering naked under her shower curtain, unresponsive, through a Toronto park at night. Throughout the film, Tracy is shown sitting in a strange white-walled room, either a police station or a mental hospital. Therefore it is implied that she will eventually be picked up and returned to safety, to get treatment for her problems and to be reunited with her parents. It is never said whether or not Sonny will ever return home. As Tracy's father says, a blizzard had ravaged Toronto in the time Sonny disappeared, so he might have gotten lost in the blizzard and died, sadly.

Tags: flashback

Review:
The film consists of hundreds of fragments of pictures, each showing different perspectives of the same moment mixing up reality and thoughts and fantasies of Tracy, the 15-year old protagonist.
It's bizarre but an experience.One great portion of the film are the little scenes when you get dumped into Tracey's fantasy world.
However, this then leads the viewer to wonder if future scenes are real or just a fantasy.The highlight of the film, in my opinion, is Tracey's 'back of the bus' confessions.
It gives you a short break from the non-linear chaos of the film and sometimes will give you a chuckle.All in all, Ellen Page yet again shows how great of an actor she really is.
So I would recommend this Film to my friends who like to watch movies for more than a story..
It really does compose the delicate, mysterious tune, which is the nerve of this fine movie.Some people might think that The Tracey Fragments would benefit from a more explicit epic narrative.
It's actually possible to follow the storyline, even if the intentional non-clarity of this flick is not mastered completely.Having said all that: Ellen Page as Tracey is a very very good choice!.
the closing scene with Tracey (ellen page) walking through the park was much more powerful because there was only the single shot and the screen was no longer fragmented.
There is so much I could say about The Tracey Fragments, it is almost like a really big and scary looking roller coaster, its definitely not for everyone, but those that like it, love it.I will start with what i noticed first: the "fragments", the split screen, super impositions, whatever you want to call it, the editing.
And the reason is simple: it allows the audience to get inside the head of this alone and suffering teenager.I am a teen myself and I thought that the bullying and the family life and the emotions Tracey experiences are pretty realistic, and flawlessly portrayed by Ellen Page.
It is dark and disturbing and mostly pretty realistic, and most importantly (or annoyingly), it is very disjointed, you watch the story unfold but you don't figure out what is real and what isn't and how it all happened and why until the end.The soundtrack is amazing, I loved it and it fits perfectly, I am not a fan of Broken Social Scene (who scored the film), but I am definitely going to be looking for the soundtrack when i get some time.This movie is Canadian, and that makes me proud.
Tracey is a deeply unhappy youngster who hates her (admittedly horrible) parents, is terrorized by all the "cool" kids in school for insufficient mammary-gland development, spends most of her nights riding the subway, hooks up with a psychotic lowlife who turns out to be a drug dealer, and searches for her little brother whom she's hypnotized into thinking he's a dog and who goes missing by a frozen river when she's supposed to be watching out for him.
To help mitigate her misery, Tracey also dreams of having a relationship with a brooding "emo" bad boy at school and fantasizes that she is a famous, universally worshipped rock star.But it is not Tracey's story that is of primary interest here; rather it's the cut-and-paste film-making style director Bruce McDonald has employed to create a sense of fragmentation and dislocation in the viewer - intended, obviously, to mirror the highly chaotic and disordered nature of Tracey's world and life.
And "Juno"'s Ellen Page gives a stunning performance as the young woman caught in an ever-tightening web of self-hatred (this is, in many ways, the darker side of "Juno," and Page is much less mannered in this role).But, frankly, the movie probably would have been more moving and involving without all the migraine-inducing imagery which succeeds mainly in throwing us out of the story.
Most of the rest of the time, the approach feels more like a gimmick designed to separate this film from the rest of the "distressed-teen indie" pack than an artistically viable choice in its own right.Still, if you can get past all the artiness and visual distraction, you might just find in "The Tracey Fragments" a thoughtful, sensitive and ineffably sad glimpse into a young woman's heart..
As the main character (excellent performance from Ellen page there) gets more and more emotions, they are presented to us in a way of past, present, future and fantasy - all in different small squares on the screens.
In fact, some of the split screens act as shattered glass which seemed to be the symbolic meaning of the film where a girl's life is pretty much shattered throughout the film.Tracey Berkowitz (played by Ellen page) is a fifteen year old girl who thought it would be funny to hypnotize her brother into being a dog.
It's obvious that the film was shot with a hand-held camera but it fit very well with the dark behavior and life that Tracey endured throughout the movie.
The movie is exhausting at times but the last thirty minutes began to pick up again and make the movie interesting.Ellen Page is a versatile actress and I like her a lot more when she plays darker roles such as this movie and her best performance to date, Hard Candy.
It's almost freaky but so well done.If you love Ellen Page, this movie and Mouth to Mouth need to be seen with an open mind.
She has left home, is looking for her missing little brother Sonny and is in trouble.We are drawn into Tracey's chaotic mind and soul, but also towards her path of growth from child to woman, from fairy-tale worlds to harsh reality and acceptance of the self.
Although this is a movie about teenagers, there is nothing sweet about it, as presents very hard topics: rape, bullying, loneliness, lack of self-esteem, confused self-image, delusional thoughts, insecurity, and mental trouble.Tracey's memory fragments and thoughts appear in mini-screens within the screen and on split-screen images, which show different angles of the same scene or different scenes altogether.
Pay extra attention to the first 15-20 minutes of the film, because they are the most difficult and the ones that really give clues to understand many of the things that happen later on.The film is more complex, visually, at the beginning, when Tracey's mind and emotions are more confused, and becomes simpler and more linear at the same pace that Tracey's mind clears, to be completely linear at the end, when she accepts herself and the events related to Sonny.
The movie is also full of symbolic psychoanalytical elements, from the gender of Tracey's psychiatrist and the settings in which the consultation happens, to the appearance of different animals (a crow, a horse, and "a dog"), to the way the scenes have been patched and shown to the viewer.Ellen Page is fantastic, despite the dramatic demands of her character.
It is shot in a manner that may be unviewable for some: non-linear, fragmented scenes, and some really loud music.Dysfunctional families, weird shrinks, mean-girls at school; it is really not so much about what is happening, but about Tracey's perception of events.If you cant stand the ride, it is worth it.
The gimmick here is that the entire film is presented with multiple cameras showing different "fragments" of Tracey's memories.In the DVD bonus feature, director Bruce McDonald says he used this method to convey the nature of memories.
You might crack a smile at some scenes, and she does have a few great sarcastic lines, but mostly this is a heavy drama with an emphasis on weird.There aren't many films I can compare this to, but one that comes to mind is the excellent "Man of the Year" (2002) starring John Ritter, a movie featuring about 2 dozen actors and 2 dozen cameras filming simultaneously in real time.
And yet, with it's fragmented, multi-framed editing style, it dared to go deeper into this technique than either of those writers have ever done, allowing two different stories to occur simultaneously by juxtaposing scenes from different points in time and different settings.
this style also allowed the director to use different takes of the same action simultaneously, repeat shots, show events happening from completely different angles, focus on multiple things and characters at the same time, highlight small details, allow the scene to play out at different speeds, and sometimes just completely disorient the audience.
I like art that isn't spoon-fed to me, that I can come back to and notice something different every time, and this is that kind of movie.
For all intents and purposes, Bruce McDonald's The Tracey Fragments is a melodrama of After-School Special proportions, regardless of how hard the director (and his editor) try to dress it up as something more profound.
Fragmented images act as multiple windows, forming an endlessly elaborate collage, peering into the dark recesses of 15 year-old Tracey Berkowitz's life and mind.
Even if it was the first film to use "Mondrian multi-frame compositions" from start to finish, this will only appeal to you if you're a) an angst-ridden 15 year old girl, b) an Ellen Page fan or relative, or c) a misled fan of "Juno" who thinks anything with Ellen is better than anything else.The split screen (aka "Mondrian multi-frame compositions") is pretentious and ineffective except in a few selective sequences.
However, It becomes increasingly evident throughout the movie, that Tracey's actual memories may be as misleading as the figments of her imagination.This film was shot in only 14 days, and it shows in the poor construction of some of the scenes.
The Tracey Fragments 2/11/2010The way this film is presented is like nothing you've seen before!
The story is told in non-chronological order while separate segments eluding to the scenes of the film appear on screen to give the viewer a somewhat disjointed and fragmented narrative in order to allow us to better understand the mind of Tracey.
Ellen Page has played the role of the creepy teenage girl four times now(Hard Candy, The Tracey Fragments, Juno, and Smart People), and each time it's a completely different character and each time she really is able to lend a lot of personality and depth to the character.
At first I found the fragmented screen shots during the opening to be a clever play on the title, but when I realized that this was going to last throughout the entire movie, I seriously considered turning off the TV.
But once I understood a little more about the characters and what was going on, I was immediately drawn to it.The Tracey Fragments is about a 15 year old girl caught in a struggle between her childhood innocence and the adult world that she will inevitably have to live in (I think everyone can relate to this at least a little bit, and that's what makes this story so interesting).
Dealing with parents that don't understand her, feeling self-conscious at school and trying to understand the reality of her emotions is very confusing and overwhelming for her, which is beautifully illustrated by the disjointed, dream-like sequences that show us little pieces of her world.This isn't one of those "sit back and watch" kind of movies-- the twisted plot line and abundant symbolism requires real participation on the viewer's part.
I guarantee that several weeks to several years after you see it, you will remember it for the way fragments of Tracey's world are shown on film...
A very real and fragmented portrait of a young teenage girl named Tracey who fills life's voids with a mixture of fantasy and reality to make a very rental worthy 77 minute original film thats impact will be both lost and lasting - like every awkward 15 year old nobody you see lost in their own world at the back of the city transit.
The first thing one is likely to notice about 'The Tracey Fragments' is the ambitious editing design with almost every single scene played out in multiple split screens, with some shots broken into over a dozen pieces, all depicting the same event from various camera angles.
There are occasional clever moments, like when she imagines her life as a movie, complete with stylish opening credits, but the most interesting scenes are those in which she converses with her psychiatrist, which are mostly of interest since the role is inexplicably played by an actor in drag..
The end twist is a bit awkward..but looks like no other go to make it to end.The movie is an odd visual effort playing with the screen slices.
Tracey Berkowitz (Ellen Page) is a 15 year old girl out in the night looking for her little brother Sonny who barks like a dog.
It tries to complicate things visually but ends up making things look simplistic.The biggest asset this movie has is Ellen Page.
The Tracey Fragments is a dark Canadian film starring Ellen Page directed by Bruce McDonald.
There's nothing wrong with the split screen effect" but the more the film went on, the more I found myself really wishing they'd show us scenes normally- so we could see the detail in the shot- I know the director probably wanted us to feel this way.
Like Mike Figgis's Timecode which presenting the film four frames simultaneously on screen, sometime you just need to admire a person who did it; regardless what is said and done in the story.
The Tracey Fragments is the movie that will embraced by people who really into a film-making process, if not just for any regular moviegoers.In Christopher Nolan's Memento, the film plays with time.
Their tyrantness, lust, and stupidity that end up causing someone else's life, maybe this is the film that trying to show Tracey (By the way, great vehicle for Ellen Page, she's just perfect for the part) a step to embrace her own reality and feeling guilty for the thing she have done.The running time for this film is only 70 or so minute.
The London premiere of Canadian movie "The Tracey Fragments" was shown tonight at the Rich Mix cinema as part of the East London Film Festival.
Known across the film world for it's split-screen footage as well as it's star, Canadian native Ellen Page, it made for an interesting and ambiguous viewing experience.The plot, narrated in a disorganized flashback, tells of Tracey Berkowitz (Ellen Page) and her attempt to find her missing brother Sonny (Zie Souwand) in the frozen backwaters of the Canadian suburbs.
A bullied and misanthropic youngster who never really fits in to either her family or school, Tracey takes on a journey as she searches for her brother but also herself at the same time."The Tracey Fragments" is indeed just that, with the same told from multiple angles in a single frame on-screen that convey Tracey's fractured mind, family and life.
It may take a while to get used to THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS shot not in just split screen, but if you will...
The story line is also fragmented and after a half hour or so, you are already involved.Page plays 15-year-old Tracey Berkowitz, who comes from a very screwed up family to say the least.
"The Tracey Fragments", is the story of 15 year old girl (Ellen Page), who is self described as "a normal teenage girl who hates herself", the movie is told mostly out of chronological order, ...(read more)but we open with images of Tracey riding a bus, wrapped in a curtain and looking out the windows in a blizzard, hating the world, and obsessed with finding her missing brother Sunny.
Like the title says Tracey is fragmented, and visually this translates into everything in the film occurring on multiple screens at once.
Really this movie is little like Run Lola Run, save they're both indie films, highly inventive in terms of script, editing, cinematography, and direction, and both have commanding lead actresses.
(Spoiler in next paragraph) The films clearest moment Tracey finding her brothers hat near a snow bank in a simple wide shot, slowly lines like cracks in ice slowly appear up the screen dividing the image into multiple shots of the lake, as Tracey's mind literally fragments and looks away to avoid the obvious.
In this movie, Ellen plays the character Tracey Berkwitz, a sixteen years old girl who on the verge of her insanity and tries to find her missing little brother.As the director, Bruce McDonald presented this film with a very unique way.
But for me, The Tracey Fragments is one solid ending away to become one of the best indie film I've ever seen..
So here's Tracey Berkowitz, a young girl in the back of a bus, telling you where she's heading and who's she's looking for: her younger, 9-year old brother, who believes he's a dog and has gone missing recently.Yet it's not only that she's on the lookout for someone.
I watched this on my computer monitor, a streaming movie from Netflix.Ellen Page was 18 or 19 when this was filmed, playing 15-year-old Tracey Berkowitz who gets teased at school constantly because she is underdeveloped, while the other girls her age are buxom.
This adds confusion at times, and after a while it becomes more annoying than interesting, but still makes the movie a visual experiment not quite like any other.Interesting to view, but not greatly interesting.
Young Tracey Berkowitz (Ellen Page) is a distraught 15-year-old.
I just wish it been for a more worthwhile purpose.Tracey Berkowitz (Ellen Page) is a 15 year old Canadian girl with a whole lot going on.
There are some scenes where I felt that it was beneficial to the story and feel of the film, but other time it felt like filler for an already short movie.But now for my summary of Ellen Page.
There are scenes that felt so real to me because he acting was so good, but the split screen effects got in the way.Overall, it was a good way to spend some time if you want something different or just something to appreciate the brilliant Ellen Page..