ShaunHuston filmblog

The Tracey Fragments is a movie that plays with your mind, but not for common, plot-driven reasons. Rather, director Bruce McDonald, writer Maureen Medved, and editors Gareth Scales and Jeremy Munce, blur the lines between forms of reality – interior/exterior, perceived/objective – not to misdirect or form a puzzle, but to pull the audience into the world of the film's teen protagonist, Tracey Berkowitz (Ellen Page).

I have no doubt that others in the overstuffed Salem Cinema auditorium last weekend would have a different a take on the film, that there is a thread of external/objective reality running through the narrative. And maybe there is. However, I don't think that the filmmakers provide any grounds upon which to establish which images are meant to signify, for certain, some bedrock reality and which represent Tracey's subjective experience of the world.

The Tracey Fragments visualizes its title by showing its (non-linear) narrative in split screen and “picture-in-picture” images. Sometimes the audience is shown the same scene from different angles, both simultaneously and synchronically, and sometimes the audience is provided with images from different scenes (childhood memories alongside present-day action, for example). Perhaps most interestingly are the singular, but split, images, that is, different parts of the screen are given their own frame, but within each frame is some piece of the same shot, rather than a distinct view. There are images which are clearly plucked from Tracey's memories or fantasy life. There are also those that seem like composites of her exterior and interior realities. Her therapy visits to Dr. Heker (Julian Richings) are cases in point.

Taken separately, one could write off Heker's apparent cross-dressing (male dressing as female) or pure white office, as quirky affectations in a film already populated with interesting and odd people, but together they create a mise-en-scène too surreal to be taken as objective. At the same time, it seems highly likely that Tracey is, in fact, in therapy. While no single image seems grounded in certainty, that something bad happened to Tracey's younger brother, Sonny (Zie Souwand), and she feels culpable somehow, are clearly and consistently shown to be the sparks for the journey/ordeal she undergoes.

One scene in particular makes me doubt the “reality” of anything the audience sees. We see Tracey in a medium long shot, after having apparently run away from home, moving to a phone booth. In close-up, she dials. The screen splits and we see her mom (Erin McMurtry) answer the phone. She listens, but doesn't speak as Tracey says, “Mom? Mom?” The images go from split screen to p.i.p, one and then the other assuming the position of the dominant view. They hang up. Tracey loses it.

The scene seems mundane and real enough, but the shots of her mother are the only ones in the whole film where Tracey is absent (to truly confirm this, I would have to see the movie again, but I think I am correct in asserting that Tracey is present, in one way or another, in every other shot). This leads me to think that the conversation, however objective it appears to be, is, in some part, imagined by Tracey. Maybe she made the phone call, and maybe she didn't. Maybe she dialed home and dad (Ari Cohen) actually answered. Maybe she blocked out whoever answered the phone. Maybe no one answered. Maybe she dialed up the time. The world of the film, that is, Tracey's world, is slippery and polysemic, meaning that there is always more than one possible meaning or interpretation to any shot. While this is, at some level, true of all films, in The Tracey Fragments the multiplicity of possible meanings, rather than cultivation of preferred meanings, is consistently foregrounded.

There are brief moments where the screen holds a single, undivided shot. Maybe these are objective, exterior reality, or moments of clarity for Tracey, but I think that that singularity is too easy to grab onto. In the context of the film, I can only see them as additional fragments. Perhaps larger and more occupying than others, but still just fragments. A piece of some lived/perceived reality, but not the undivided whole.

The Tracey Fragments will likely leave some feeling thankful that they are not screwed up like Page's heroine, that they, unlike her, have a firm grasp on the world. Others, myself included, will leave thinking how close our own experiences of the world are to Tracey's, particularly as visualized by McDonald and Company. Tracey's feelings of fragmentation, of being split into multiple selves and living in different realities, may be more intense and debilitating than it is for most, but how many of us truly live lives where perception, thought, and external reality are in perfect alignment? Not many, and, compared to Tracey, we are, perhaps, simply better at maintaining the illusion of coherence than we are truly free of our own splitscreens and pictures-in-pictures.