Teenage wasteland

Tracey Berkowitz (Ellen Page) is a 15-year-old girl who gets lost while searching for her missing brother in Bruce McDonald's film The Tracey Fragments. (Odeon Films/Alliance Atlantis)

Director Bruce McDonald premiered his film The Tracey Fragments at the Berlin Film Festival last spring. As he tells it, after the screening he fielded two types of response: “They’d say: ‘It’s just too much. Too much information. Too much.’ Or they’d say: ‘Wow, we haven’t seen that before. Thank you.’”

Grinning above his signature silver tooth — a souvenir of a youthful evening involving a beer bottle and a wall — McDonald looks pleased with both responses. He is a man who likes a reaction. When his now-cult-classic rock-’n’-road debut Roadkill won a $25,000 prize at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1989, he infamously announced that he would spend the cash on “a big chunk of hash.”

McDonald still likes to play the impoverished rebel: he optioned the rights to The Tracey Fragments by sending his cowboy boots in the mail to the novel’s author, Maureen Medved. “I had no cash,” he says.

But McDonald is maturing, too. At 48, he is no longer the new bad boy on the block, but a staple of Canadian cinema, and the father of a four-year-old girl. Coincidentally, as we sit in a restaurant in Toronto’s Little Italy neighbourhood, McDonald’s daughter walks by with her mom. She runs in, grabs the microphone and begins repeating everything her father says. (Dad: “How was school, sweetie?” Daughter: “How was school, sweetie?” Hysterical laughter.) McDonald, grizzly-big in his leather jacket, looks utterly besotted.

Medved, a University of British Columbia professor, accepted the cowboy boots as collateral (“She eventually got some money,” assures McDonald) and wrote the screen adaptation of her book. The film tells the story of 15-year-old teenage wasteland Tracey Berkowitz, played by Ellen Page, riding a bus through a bleak city, wrapped in a shower curtain, looking for her baby brother. That’s the linear version. Fragments, as its title suggests, actually unfolds as a non-chronological series of split-screens and boxes; it’s like watching an elastic Rubik’s cube twist and turn. At various moments, images and dialogue recede, foreground and overlap. The effect is a shattered film for a shattered adolescent psyche. Masked by her bangs, Tracey endures grubby sex, hallway tortures and vicious parents. She is, like all teens, a comically unreliable narrator. It’s a sticky, grim teen movie, far removed from the glib bourgeois turmoil of Gossip Girl and John Hughes.

Director Bruce McDonald. (Carlo Allegri/Getty)

“There’s that genre of teenage angst film, and this is kind of an explosion of that genre,” says McDonald. “Maybe the genre makes people feel slightly at home. They say: ‘I know this, it’s sort of familiar.’ But the dream is very different this time.”

Selling such a radical dream to the public, however, isn’t easy, and McDonald admits that he does want an audience. “Getting Broken Social Scene to do the score, getting Ellen Page to be in it — these are very calculated decisions to say: We know this is kind of crazy experimental, but at the same time, we don’t want anyone to feel stupid.”

Page’s ascent since the film was shot in the spring of 2006 has been stratospheric. Born in Halifax, she had a successful career as a young actress in Canada (Marion Bridge), but the 2005 Sundance darling Hard Candy proved a breakthrough. She came to the set of Tracey right from playing Kitty Pryde in the $100-million action franchise, X-Men 3.

“We were lucky to have her,” says McDonald. “I think she was excited to be in an intimate little collaboration after something like X-Men. We talked about music; she had a hand in casting. I think she really wants to be part of a creative team, and that doesn’t always happen.”

In fact, Page’s affection for the Patti Smith album Horses turned the title song into one of the film’s major metaphors. (Land of Talk’s Elizabeth Powell does a cover of the track because Smith’s version was too expensive.) At the Toronto film festival last month, Page was in the eye of the media hurricane for her role in the upcoming American comedy Juno, directed by Jason Reitman (which recently won the top prize at the Rome film festival). She’s received breathless notices in Entertainment Weekly and Vanity Fair, and it’s hard not to notice that she’s largely absent from promotion for The Tracey Fragments. Does McDonald feel abandoned?

“I’m thrilled because it’s going to lead people to our film. She’s going to be on the cover of magazines and talk shows, and then there’s this other thing she did, our crazy art film,” he says. “She’s the carnival barker outside the theatre: ‘Come one, come all, see Ellen Page!’ And then they come in and: ‘Holy f---, what is this?’”

Whatever it is, it was notable enough to earn the Manfred Salzgeber award at Berlin (awarded “to a film that broadens the boundaries of cinema today”). While the form may be new, the content — alienation, drugs, basements and alleys — is McDonald in his comfort zone. As in his earlier films, such as Hard Core Logo and Dance Me Outside, McDonald gives space to the outcasts, the grubby misfits clomping through an unwelcoming world in big boots, defiant and heartfelt.

“I guess I’m drawn to the outsider because I’m an eternal teenager in that way,” he says. “I always feel a little outside of things, a little alienated. It’s like Woody Allen on the train in Stardust Memories. He’s on the train with all these old people and he looks across the tracks at the other train with people drinking and laughing and he’s like, ‘What? How did I get on that train?’” McDonald laughs, then adds: “Maybe that’s what it’s like to be a Canadian filmmaker — you’re always outside the gates of Hollywood.”

Tracey looks to Lance (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) for guidance in The Tracey Fragments. (Odeon Films/Alliance Atlantis)

But McDonald is no stranger to the mainstream. He makes most of his money directing TV, including Degrassi: The Next Generation. Seven years ago, he came close to the gates of Hollywood but didn’t quite pass through. He directed Juliette Lewis and Mickey Rourke in a $10-million caper called Picture Claire, backed by super-producer Robert Lantos. Famously, McDonald declared the studio-approved version a failure and recut it, but the film never received a commercial release.

“It was sort of like being sent to movie jail: ‘Here’s all the money, but we need a big hit in America.’ That was the order to the cook,” he says. McDonald made a documentary on the fiasco called Claire’s Hat: The Unmaking of a Film, which he describes as “maybe the best film I’ve made.” It had a rare screening at Toronto’s Cinematheque in October.

“I’m proud of Claire’s Hat,” he says. “But it was my lesson in learning that money is no smarter than the artist.”

Between Claire and The Tracey Fragments, McDonald directed one other feature, The Love Crimes of Gillian Guess (2004). Originally shot for TV, it made barely a ripple with the public, but McDonald has taken the film’s pop-art experimentalism and run with it. The Tracey Fragments cost $750,000, according to the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com). Shot digitally in 14 days in Hamilton using a tiny crew and natural light, it then took seven months — or “hellish” months, as McDonald puts it — to edit.  He was picking up DIY cues from his Ryerson days, when his heroes were avant-garde filmmakers like Bruce Elder and Michael Snow.

“This wasn’t just split screen to convey information and content. We wanted to use it more emotionally, like an echo, or like embroidery,” says McDonald. “We thought, the more we can experience the world the way little Tracey Berkowitz does, the closer we’ll feel to her romantic notions, her tendency to exaggerate. We want to feel her crisis.”

And for those who are wary, he reminds me, it’s only 77 minutes long.

The Tracey Fragments opens Nov. 2.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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