Canadian director Bruce Macdonald (Dance Me Outside, Hardcore Logo) described seeing Miles Davis in concert. After finishing a trumpet solo, Davis nodded to his young sideman that he take over with his own solo. The collaborative effort is an apt analogy for MacDonald’s role in his new film, The Tracey Fragments. Maureen Medved, who wrote the novel on which the movie is based, also wrote the script. The film’s editors were encouraged to experiment. An artist was commissioned to turn the film into a comic book. MacDonald even asks the audience to collaborate. He has made the film’s footage available online and is holding a competition to find the best re-edit of the movie.
But the image of the jazz-band leader MacDonald evokes is most apt because the movie plays like a piece of music.
The plot of The Tracey Fragments is sparse: 15-year-old Tracey (Ellen Page) runs away from home, she searches for her brother, she rides on a bus through Winnipeg at night, and she returns home. This simple, intense storyline is elaborated not by tacked-on sub-plots but by formal complexity. The film is presented in split screen, or several split screens. Images slide, jump, and pop into view at various speeds. MacDonald cites comic books, cubism, and the montage as precedents, which paints a good picture of how the images are positioned on screen.
The effect is more rhythmic than visual. MacDonald does use music to some good affect. The score, contributed by scruffy Toronto indie collective Broken Social Scene fits the over-emotion of Tracey, and Patti Smith’s Horses adds another layer to the film’s stratification of metaphors. But all this aural music is deafened by visual rhythms, with pace and mood dependent upon the composition of images. The movie manages to push towards a conclusion, even if its few events are not presented chronologically. A short scene where Tracey’s mother thumps a spoon of mashed potatoes onto her daughter’s, then her husband’s plate is repeated several times until potato-ontoplate sounds like the death-march drum of suburban teenage life.
The pacing is frantic. As Mac- Donald warned before a screening last Friday, the first five minutes are intense in their overlay of image over image. The visual experimentation is a window into the plot’s central trauma. As in splitscreen productions, the audience is no longer contemplating reality. Instead, we’re flipping channels, thinking and seeing again like we did as teenagers.
The film might have lost coherence were it not for the centripetal force Page’s acting brings. The story keeps returning to a scene where Tracey, wearing a shower curtain, speaks directly to the camera. This seems to have been MacDonald’s plan for organizing the entire project, like Coltrane performing “My Favourite Things,” swirling off into different tonal directions, always to return to the familiar melody.
The Tracey Fragments opens nationwide November 1
