The Tracey Fragments.

"The first time I saw The Tracey Fragments, I felt as if I was seeing a revolution in film form, a new visual concept that made us process images in a fundamentally different way," writes Dan Sallitt in the Auteurs' Notebook. "And the second time I saw it, I realized that you could play the soundtrack in your living room and enjoy the film without ever looking at it. I wonder whether these seemingly contradictory impressions are related.... The Tracey Fragments is not the first film to use paneled images, but it's the first feature-length narrative that I know of that relies on paneling as its basic method of visual communication, that dispenses with the safety net of the full-frame image." And he offers "a partial, not terribly rigorous taxonomy of the effects I noted in Tracey."

Updated through 5/9.

"Unlike the frustrating gimmickry of Mike Figgis's Timecode and Hotel, [Bruce] McDonald's bedazzling multi-frame experiment poeticizes and enhances an otherwise slender story (forgivable at only 77 minutes long), as planes of different sizes and shapes materialize - fading, sliding, distorting, and overlapping to convey the rage and anxiety of damaged adolescence," writes Aaron Hillis in the Voice.

"Lukas Moodysson's currently undistributed Container, too, is a schizophrenic movie about a schizophrenic protagonist," notes Mark Asch in the L Magazine, "a scratchy black-and-white effort featuring multiple narratives seeping in and out of each other and a disjunctive voiceover - though unlike Container, which wormed its way inside personal trauma towards a warped sense of transcendence, there's a sense, with Tracey, that director Bruce McDonald is using sensory overload and a some-assembly-required narrative to cover up for the fact that there's not much of a there here."

"Unfortunately, the net result of all this punkish avant-garde audacity... is to demonstrate yet again that with experimental shattering of conventions, more is less," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. "Still, Ellen Page remains one of the few stellar newcomers who deserves to be seen in anything she chooses to do."

At the SpoutBlog, Karina Longworth notes that "newfound fame has made Tracey a more viable commodity than it would have been otherwise, but it also attracts a brighter spotlight than a little Canadian art film can be expected to withstand gracefully. I just imagine Guy Maddin must wake up every morning and thank God that no one in My Winnipeg has become the subject of lesbian rumors on gossip blogs. (Actually, never mind - Guy Maddin would probably love that)."

Update, 5/8: "Playing a character whose hang-ups have textbook root causes (dysfunctional parents, school bullies), and whose quest to locate brother Sonny (Zie Souwand) is rambling and insipid, Page nonetheless does her best to deliver a focused portrait of adolescent turmoil," writes Nick Schager in Slant. "It's a futile effort, though, as writer Maureen Medved regularly undercuts her protagonist's intense disorientation by saddling her with Juno-esque quips ('Happy people, they friggin' depress me, you know?') that even Page - by virtue of her ho-hum delivery - seems to find lame."

Updates, 5/9: "In the hands of a more literal-minded filmmaker The Tracey Fragments might well have been dreary and unbearable, a chronicle of florid self-pity justified by arbitrary cruelty," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Instead it is fierce, enigmatic and affecting."

"Ms Page, who is not only on-screen in every scene but in multiple images within each scene, gamely rolls up her thespian sleeves and digs into her down-and-dirty role, but there's more going on visually than dramatically in The Tracey Fragments, and ultimately the film resembles an experiment in cinematically enhanced performance art more than a story of any sustained insight or conviction," writes Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun.

Posted by dwhudson at May 7, 2008 1:34 PM