I watched this on my computer monitor, a streaming movie from Netflix.
Ellen Page was 18 or 19 when this was filmed, playing 15-year-old Tracey Berkowitz who gets teased at school constantly because she is underdeveloped, while the other girls her age are buxom. She has strange parents, and a little brother who barks like a dog and wags his tongue. When dad insists that someone tell him why the boy is barking Tracey says she hypnotized him.
In much of the movie Tracey is trying to find her little brother. We never know quite why he is lost, except maybe as a "dog" he has wandered away.
At one point Tracey is sent to a psychiatrist, played by a man dressed up as a woman and with a wig.
There really isn't much of a story here, and it is told in fragments. Maybe that is why it is called "Tracey Fragments", maybe it is a glimpse into the fragmented mind of a teenager trying to figure out what life is like.
Her mind fabricates all kinds of stories. A girl may die in a swamp, no one knows where the body is, it decays and flowers grow from it. Bees make love to the flowers to produce honey, and eventually the parents of the dead girl buy the honey and eat it, so in the cycle they eat the girl. She also does one about horses, glue factory, kids making things in school, eat the glue, eat the horse.
If this had been edited in a conventional fashion it would have been perhaps the most boring movie of the year. But the editor had a new toy, and the film is presented in multiple fragments, sometimes with as many as 12, or even more, different segments on the screen. This adds confusion at times, and after a while it becomes more annoying than interesting, but still makes the movie a visual experiment not quite like any other.
Interesting to view, but not greatly interesting. Ellen Page is good.
Ellen Page was 18 or 19 when this was filmed, playing 15-year-old Tracey Berkowitz who gets teased at school constantly because she is underdeveloped, while the other girls her age are buxom. She has strange parents, and a little brother who barks like a dog and wags his tongue. When dad insists that someone tell him why the boy is barking Tracey says she hypnotized him.
In much of the movie Tracey is trying to find her little brother. We never know quite why he is lost, except maybe as a "dog" he has wandered away.
At one point Tracey is sent to a psychiatrist, played by a man dressed up as a woman and with a wig.
There really isn't much of a story here, and it is told in fragments. Maybe that is why it is called "Tracey Fragments", maybe it is a glimpse into the fragmented mind of a teenager trying to figure out what life is like.
Her mind fabricates all kinds of stories. A girl may die in a swamp, no one knows where the body is, it decays and flowers grow from it. Bees make love to the flowers to produce honey, and eventually the parents of the dead girl buy the honey and eat it, so in the cycle they eat the girl. She also does one about horses, glue factory, kids making things in school, eat the glue, eat the horse.
If this had been edited in a conventional fashion it would have been perhaps the most boring movie of the year. But the editor had a new toy, and the film is presented in multiple fragments, sometimes with as many as 12, or even more, different segments on the screen. This adds confusion at times, and after a while it becomes more annoying than interesting, but still makes the movie a visual experiment not quite like any other.
Interesting to view, but not greatly interesting. Ellen Page is good.