Fraggle Rock

Photo by Matt O'Sullivan.

The Tracey Fragments hurtles frame after frame within frame after frame in telling its story of a disillusioned young girl wrapped in a shower curtain in search of her younger brother who she may have hypnotized into thinking he is a dog. Or something like that. The film is not unlike the 400 Blows in its empathy for rebel youth, conjuring its spirit throughout and ending with the lead character's march into oblivion. This final scene, left entirely uninterrupted, is one of the few full frame sequences in the whole film, the total of which can be counted on both hands. Once you've done that, wrap your fingers around a steel pipe and smash the nearest mirror into a billion pieces then look at yourself in the shattered glass. In approximately two minutes you will have duplicated the effect I suppose the filmmakers are going for here. From a visual standpoint, it is compelling, obviously. Though the idea of sitting through 75 or so minutes of endless screen splits and narrative hop scotch would seem to most the cinematic equivalent of deciphering one of those 3D digital mosaic paintings during an earthquake, the Tracey Fragments is really no more nauseating than the type of hyper editing that Michael Bay tends to over employ in just about everything he films. What most likely will hold your interest in the Tracey Fragments, as opposed to epic-length robot carnage, is star Ellen Page, who delivers a foul mouthed, far angrier version of Juno MacGuff, and the whole damn experiment of it all. Director Bruce MacDonald, writer Maureen Medved and editors Jeremy Munce and Gareth Scales earn points for at least attempting to centralize their film's humanity in the sum of its many, many pieces.