Her mind is razor sharp, she'll hack you to death with stark imagery and often devastatingly bleak view. The title says it all: this special little book contains fragments of Tracey's mind structured in a way that only makes sense to her. I feel like the only way to show you is to type out every single page into this box but it's probably easier if you just go and read it yourself.Īround me people always breathe through their mouths Not only is it the best book I've read, it's the most important and most inspiring. I'm a pretty enthusiastic person and that means I catch myself saying THIS IS THE BEST BOOK I'VE EVER READ too often. They don't know how the knives in my skull carve tunnels to other places Nothing wrong with that as a backstory, but to convolute it to the point that most readers can't make heads or tails of what they're reading to make it more bold and daring - or perhaps more performable? These fragments have been done as performance art - is IMHO falling for the siren song of art over content.Īn average 2.5 stars for the language alone. It's all her internal hell blizzard of guilt. Almost none of what she tells us is real. ![]() Tracey, wracked with guilt, gets on a city bus and hallucinates or fabricates all sorts of rants, events, people and situations- fragments - as a blizzard (symbolic of her state of mind/spirit) hits the city. She has to find him - she will never find him.because he's dead and she knows it.) Worse still, Sonny accidentally dies while she's with Billy. The day he finally takes a little bit of interest in her - he's only after fast sex of course - she's supposed to be watching her little brother (Sonny, who may genuinely have mental problems).īilly more or less rapes Tracey, but she blames herself because she liked him so much. Especially after she falls for bad boy Billy Speed at her school. Here's what I deduced: Tracey has heard about her traumatised, sex obsessed grandma all her life and thinks - in her awkward teenage state - that they must be somehow similar. The plot - or at least what's happened - can be deduced in the final ten pages. The characterisation is bare-bones, the people nothing more than shadow puppets thrown on the wall.Īnd that's where the style shoots itself in the foot. The stark, in-your-face language paired with imaginative descriptions of ordinary things you'd find in a Canadian city in the winter are really the only things keeping this novella together, or readable. It also will be released on DVD July 8th."The Tracey Fragments" is what happens when artists get too artsy and confuse style for storytelling. (Movie is showing at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from Tuesday July 1st through Sunday July 6th. She’s mostly effective, when her director isn’t getting in her way. The actors are fine, but it’s really all about Page, who’s in nearly every scene. Here he’s too self-indulgent with the split-screen stuff, lessening the impact of the tale. Director McDonald is an indie vet (Roadkill, Highway 61) who’s spent most of the last 15 or so years directing Canadian television. When her 9-year-old brother Sonny goes missing, Tracey runs away from home to try to find him, encountering street characters and the underbelly of society along the way. Tracey’s kept going by her glam-rock fantasies about the new boy in school, Billy Zero. ![]() ![]() The movie attempts to show her in an emotional and mental tailspin, as she’s tormented by classmates, and badgered by her frustrated father and wacko-addict mother. Tracey’s a typical 15-year-old girl, we’re told typical because she hates herself. “Fragments” is an apt term for this extravaganza of split-screen technique, used way too much, probably in response to the relative lack of story. ![]() It’s of interest primarily because of it-girl Page, late of last year’s Juno and this year’s Smart People. Canadian film made the festival circuit last year and had a limited release in May.
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