The Tracey Fragments
Starring: Ellen Page, Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, Ari Cohen
Director: Bruce McDonald
The film: A scrambled timeline of events, the interweaving of grittily realistic scenes with heavily-stylised fantasy sequences, and frenetic editing which sees scenes recycled through different angles and perspectives. The whole thing is done on a near continuous 77-minute split-screen montage.
It would have been a contrived experiment in the hands of a lesser creative team but director Bruce McDonald and his lead actor Ellen Page (right) turn what could have been merely a hodge-podge of visual gimmickry into something much more engaging. This is a perfectly cohesive, very powerful character study of a suburban teenager at odds with the cruel and confusing realities of adolescence.
What makes The Tracey Fragments such an effective exercise lies, first and foremost, in how McDonald established a solid narrative beneath all the technical wizardry he would conjure later in post-production, supported by an effective sound design and Broken Social Scene's musical score.
The film begins with 15-year-old Tracey Berkowitz (played by Page), sat on a moving bus with only a curtain wrapped around her, apparently on the edge of insanity.