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by Brian Gibson, published on March 20, 2008 Mainstream films have done surprisingly little with the cinematic form. Dissolves, fades, washes, time lags and split screens are rarely used, certainly not obviously. There was Mike Figgis’s screen-quartering Timecode experiment, and the Brit police procedural Trial and Retribution uses multiple frames, but cases are few and far between. Veteran Canadian director Bruce McDonald’s The Tracey Fragments can hardly be called a mainstream film, though that’s largely because of its form—the one image we’re used to seeing on screen is sliced and diced, then laid out all over the cinematic cutting-board. Sometimes the effect is confusing—a parade of small images will pop up at the top or bottom of the screen—or better suited to a video art exhibit. When Tracey (Ellen Page) thinks she sees her missing brother in a coffee shop, strips of images are unnecessary—she’s whirling around but fixated on looking for him, and the shot should be absolutely single-minded, too. Elsewhere, the form doesn’t overwhelm content but enhances the story’s emotion, as when Tracey hits the side of a telephone booth over and over in frustration. With each slam of her body against the glass, a small shot of her mother, who’s hung up at the other end of the line, drums into view. Aural and visual mix here to pound out this connection that’s slipping away. There’s an outstanding dreamy-sex-then-back-to-brutal-reality scene, too, and a moment when a murder of crows flit through Tracey’s black- and blood-stained mind. Tracey feels fractured—she may have a split personality disorder, or be another teenager who feels torn, or both—and her sense of reality, of truth, is ragged and kaleidoscopic. She talks about pieces—pieces of people and things becoming part of somebody; sex is a way of taking someone in, absorbing an essence—and her memories split off in different directions. The restless, near-randomness of teenage life, when the pieces don’t quite fit, jigs and jags along. The short bursts of dialogue aren’t always sharp, though. Tracey’s expressions are as often diary-style earnest as naïvely profound. (Exhibit A—“He stuck his cock in me and said I love you” vs “it feels like someone cut you open with a jagged piece of glass.” Exhibit B—A down-and-out guy talks like an academic dramaturge: “I’d like to interject here ... ”) Page fires along, but she’s overcome by the shards of shots. McDonald (Highway 61, Hard Core Logo) adds a scruffy, punk look—Tracey’s crush, Billy Zero (played by the even-better-sounding Slim Twig) is a Dean meets Dylan rebel out of a ’70s flick—but the film can fall into an action-strip sense of squalor, scuzzy crudeness that pops out and beats Tracey back down (usually when she or someone else is half-naked). One of Canada’s Top Ten for 2007, The Tracey Fragments boasts a cross-country pedigree: background footage of Winnipeg, on-location shooting in Hamilton, adapted from her novel by a Vancouver-based writer. The film’s fragmentary form shatters a strong sense of place, adding to Tracey’s sense of alienation and being lost in a vague cityscape of sameness but subtracting a necessary layer of reality, giving less to hold onto in a film that can be hard to focus on. There are some overlapping themes and motifs—belts, whiteness and an approaching blizzard—and dark obsessions that have been cut loose from their Christian origins (transubstantiation, sex associated with a loss of innocence). But the basic power of the plot’s rewound revelation isn’t there, shrapneled by the form. The bits and pieces of imagery work better when we’re contemplating a still scene—squares of sunlight on a floor as Tracey plays a board game, or Tracey making faces in a photo booth. Motion tends to be muddled: reruns and slo-mos of Tracey running, or a shot that’s just reframed differently, not actually focussed on other details, distract and detract. More limited fields of vision, rather than a panoptic, fly’s eye-view of the world, would be more powerful. The film’s unrelenting collage of images cuts both ways, then, but The Tracey Fragments is more admirable than enjoyable. Some films reward multiple viewings, but this film, offering multiple views, falls short of being memorably singular. Source: www.vueweekly.com |
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© 2006-2010 Dominik Keppner
© 2006-2010 Dominik Keppner
