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A visually experimental rummage around the mind of self-conscious teen Tracey Berkowitz, played by Ellen Pag by Holly Grigg-Spall Based on a stream of consciousness young adult novel, The Tracey Fragments sets a pre-Juno Ellen Page in the midst of an MTV-like editing experiment. Director Bruce McDonald aims to present the hormone addled workings of a teenage girl's mind with the split screen technique - showing events, memories and fantasies, all reinterpreted by Tracey Berkowitz (Page) in from two to 20 boxes simultaneously on screen. The slight plot introduces Tracey as victim to a couple of distant, difficult parents (Cohen and McMurty) and protector of her small brother Sonny (Souwand) who disappears one night after Tracey has hypnotized him to behave like a dog. However odd, the story is secondary to the presentation of Tracey's character, but after a time the film's style renders it borderline unwatchable. On the small screen (The Tracey Fragments is released straight to disc in the UK) the multiplying boxes can be confusing and lack the clarity or impact they might have been afforded by a cinema screen. Tracey uses movie-speak to articulate her thoughts. A language picked up from actors, it details thoughts and feelings in empty dramatic gestures. "You know in the news when two retards had a baby? That was me. Just kidding," she says at one point. "How do you know what's real and what's not when the whole world is inside your head?" It's the sort of puffed-up teen talk that comes from a lethal cocktail of movies, school reading lists and movies based on novels on school reading lists. That said, the split screen technique feels more satisfactory and more accurate than the usual 2D word of teenagers in movies. The director imposes the outside world onto Tracey's mind - the multi layered sensory overload of a young person bombarded by the media. Does that media reflect her mind or does it shape her mind? At one point she picks up a music magazine and imagines herself as a successful rock star in a collection of dreamed up magazine covers, interviews and incidents. "When a horse falls, foam comes out of its mouth&somebody shoots it. The horse turns into glue. A machine puts the glue into bottles and children squeeze the bottles to get the glue out and stick bits of paper onto cards. Glue gets on the children's hands and the children eat the glue. And the children become the horse." Tracey's mind is open to the elements. She absorbs any available guidance on how to speak, behave, react. And as any young girl develops she's all style, no substance - it takes time for her affectations to be filled out with actual feeling. Watching Ellen Page post-Juno, her performance has a tired tone - she's been here before and done better. The experimental style saves The Tracey Fragments being a mere Juno dress rehearsal. As we watch her mature as an actress, she shows us new young female characters which we will then absorb as fragments of her new personality possibilities. This constant conversation between audience and entertainment was well illustrated by the film's promotion project which saw all the raw footage from the shoot released onto the internet for people to rework and edit into their own film interpretations before seeing McDonald's The Tracey Fragments. He asked them to use the media available to reflect their own minds' workings. Cinema watchers can now present their own perceptions of the world, to the world, put their personal movies on channels like Youtube. The Tracey Fragments suggests our media-shaped minds may have only a few original scenes left to shuffle. Verdict An audacious filmmaking experiment that throws up interesting questions. Rating: 2,5 out of 5 Source: www.channel4.com |
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Last Update: 09/02/2010
© 2006-2010 Dominik Keppner
© 2006-2010 Dominik Keppner
