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Simply A Masterpiece

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Ever notice whenever a work of art is referred to as "experimental" it usually sucks? Not so here, if "The Tracey Fragments" is indeed experimental, I'd have to say the experiment produced successful results. 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. And true, if you think about it, how often do you have a memory that plays out like a linear story? Most often memories jump back & forth, focus on different objects, change perspective and become intertwined with other memories.If you're ready for a disorienting experience like this, then you'll enjoy this movie because, while being difficult to digest, it's ultimately a rewarding experience. Tracey (expertly played by Ellen Page) is a 15-year-old outcast who is constantly ridiculed & abused by schoolmates, parents and strangers. The movie recounts 2 or 3 intense days in her life, beginning with the story of her missing brother, jumping back to a few days before, and eventually coming full circle and then beyond. While the story itself is linear, the narration (through Tracey's memories) is anything but linear, and the multiple cameras add a deeper dimension of confusion.But whether you grasp every individual camera & scene or not, the story unfolds clearly, and by the end we are aware of what happened with a few dramatic surprises to boot. Although I hate the phrase "coming of age story" because it conjures up images of extreme boredom and sappiness, this movie is a great, gritty, powerful coming of age story. It's a lot like how I would imagine the book "Catcher in the Rye" with its seemingly random episodes that are glued together by a common theme. In the case of "The Tracey Fragments" (much like Catcher) the theme is about a young adolescent who sees himself/herself as the protector of a younger child; however, the protector herself is coming apart from the strain of protecting innocence while losing her own innocence.Although the character Tracey is a lot like Ellen Page's character in "Juno" as well as her character in "Whip It", don't expect the same quirky humor because "The Tracey Fragments" is much darker and sometimes disturbing. 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. Another film I'm reminded of is "Pi" (1998) the directoral debut of Darren Aronofsky who also did "Requiem for a Dream", "The Fountain" and "Black Swan". If you like dark films like those with unusual visual styles, give this one a whirl.

this is truly a good film for this year so far despite all the shitty films that came out recently. The presentation is really unique and thought-provoking in an artistic way. I find the plot suitable--not too dense which otherwise will make the whole movie too difficult to watch; not too shallow which otherwise would not do justice to the complexity of the medium. Ellen Page is superb here as an actress...she managed to give such a remarkable performance considering her small and gentle physical features. Fitting and powerful soundtrack. Only thing i can criticize is i think the director can enhance the storyflow slightly better to make this a flawless masterpiece of its own genre

If it's true, as Marshall McLuhan has suggested, that the medium is indeed the message, then "The Tracey Fragments" proves that theory in spades. This highly idiosyncratic work has as its focal point "Tracey Berkowitz - 15 - just another girl who hates herself" - a description that comes straight from the mouth of Ms. Berkowitz herself. 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. With rare exceptions, the screen is occupied by as few as two and as many as a dozen shots at a time, often portraying the same sequence from slightly different angles or at slightly different moments in time, or portraying thematically related scenes simultaneously. The question inevitably arises, is the approach effective in what it's trying to accomplish or does it serve as a distancing device for those of us who are trying to enter into Tracey's mind and world. I imagine that different viewers will come to varying verdicts on that point.Personally, I appreciate what McDonald is trying to do here more than I admire it. "The Tracey Fragments," which Maureen Medved has adapted from her own novel, offers many probing insights into the subject of teenage angst, particularly as regards the tremendous pressure modern young people are put under to "measure up" and conform to some arbitrarily agreed-upon social standard. 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. In fact, there is only one scene in which the split screen technique actually serves a narrative purpose - and that is when Tracey is hiding behind a curtain while her drug-dealer friend is being savagely beaten by the irate boss to whom he owes money. 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.

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. For their determination for inventing and experimenting something that count as a film, even you knew that you're not having a good time. 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. It was edited and rearranged backward as if an audience suffered from amnesia like the protagonist. The Tracey Fragments was also heavily edited to represent subconscious of adolescence mind. What's in Tracey's mind is fragmented; reality and fantasy are overlapping with each other simultaneously in each tiny frame presented on screen. It's maybe difficult to catch up from time to time, but it's worthwhile if you're getting the hang of it.And just like Memento, if you watch it in a perfect sequence narrative, it will be just another straightforward drama that has nothing much to add on. And to make it worse, The Tracey Fragments is suffered from serious lack of decent dialogs. What we've heard are only whining or bitching about society from hormone-inducing teenage girl. And it's even more embarrassing when secondary characters like parents or strangers open their mouth.But it maybe filmmaker's intention after all, maybe he want to show us how uncomplicated and simple adolescence are. They may speak what's in the heart without processing through the mind. 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. It took only 14 days to shoot, but it took 9 months to edit. The Tracey Fragments may not teach you anything, nor give you a good time in return. But for that kind of dedication, you just gotta give it to them.