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. What follows is a gradual unpeeling of the story, as McDonald - with a script adapted by novelist Maureen Medved from her own book - takes the viewer through a maze of teenage crushes, a domestic breakdown, a younger sibling who behaves like a dog and a brush with sexual violence that eventually leads to Tracey's present conundrum. The Tracey Fragments was made after Juno, and McDonald's film - a low-budget exercise supported by Canadian provincial authorities and national film institutions - does look like the flip-side of that feel-good teenage-pregnancy drama which propelled Page to an Oscar nomination and international stardom. Instead of supportive parents and benign social circumstances, Tracey has to deal with a dysfunctional family, beauty-queen classmates who bully her for her curveless physique, and a boy who discards her in the most ruthless of manners after a quickie in his car. And then there's her vain search for her young brother, whom she left to his own devices in the forest after she played fetch with him - a pursuit that would lead to a nasty encounter that nearly sees her raped at the home of a man who promised to help her find her sibling. While McDonald maintains a steady hand as he unravels a simple storyline, it's Page's bravura performance that makes the film remarkable. Delivering yet another tour de force after her turns in Juno and the earlier and much more challenging Hard Candy, the 21-year-old proves in The Tracey Fragments to be an accomplished actor. She plays Tracey's nuances perfectly and - unlike in Juno - much is dependent on physical language or vigorous monologues. The extras: The way The Tracey Fragments pushes the artistic envelope should allow a lot of opportunities for bonus features. But there's a lack of imagination in this aspect, with only a short making-of featurette available. The only other prominent extra is a selection of short films from the Tracey Re-fragmented competition, in which McDonald uploaded unedited footage onto the Web and invited viewers to edit their own trailers or short pieces. The results, however, are hardly impressive. The verdict: A showcase of excellent acting and inventive visual and sonic technique, giving space to a piece about the anguished existence of a frustrated adolescent.