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Dir. Bruce McDonald
Rating: 5.6 | 0 User Reviews | Send to Friend
By Jes Sipling
Let’s get one thing clear upfront; the most significant point of discussion on this film is how it was shot. Taking the title quite literally, Canadian director Bruce McDonald’s non-linear approach to telling us Maureen Medved’s story of 15-year-old Tracey Berkowitz (Ellen Page), “just a normal girl who hates herself,” is a 77-minute arsenal of repetitive shots varying in size, speed and texture layered on top of each other to create a sense of the fragmented workings of memory. Set to an original score by indie-gods Broken Social Scene, McDonald’s sampling technique accomplishes two very different ends: allowing the viewer to connect the current narrative with past memories (good) and making it impossible for the audience to know what to look at (bad). Experimental art aside, the talented Page captures Tracey’s morbid, teenage existentialism, despite the Juno-esque reprise of the smart-ass outsider she's pretty much perfected. We meet Tracey on a city bus, wrapped in nothing but a curtain, looking for her younger brother Sunny (Zie Souwand) after he disappears under her care. She has run away from her alcoholic father (Ari Cohen) and depressed mother (Jackie Brown), who grounded her for three months and forced her into therapy from a cross-dressing psychiatrist (Julian Richings). Like most teenage girls, Tracey becomes obsessed with a new boy at school, Billy Zero (Slim Twig), an electrified-Dylan rip-off clad in eyeliner and a scarf. It is this infatuation that pushes Tracey deep into her own fantasies of being Tracey Zerowitz -- a Ziggy Stardust-type persona. It becomes increasingly difficult for her (and us) to tell what’s real and imagined at this point. She loses all sense of the world and, eventually, her brother. Though Page gives a powerful performance, the constant flashing of different times and memories actually begins to unravel the narrative more than augment it, though Tracey is clearly giving us her thought process, the story itself never really surfaces. Sadly, the potential was there for emotional impact, but with nothing substantial to tether the viewer to the drama, I would have to agree with the tagline: “Something’s Missing.”
Bonus features include still frames of production, the original trailer, a look behind the scenes and the top entries and winning effort of Tracey: Re-Fragmented—a contest allowing fans to resample raw footage of the movie into their own vignettes.
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