The Tracey Fragments - 32nd HKIFF

There are lots of ways in cinema in which you can fragmentize a story. You can tell the story backwards, from different angles or from different characters' experience. Yet, in "The Tracey Fragments", the director, Bruce McDonald, decided to do it by literally cutting the screen into pieces, with each of the screen showing a slightly different motions/images. The result, a film which gives almost nothing but disconnection to its story, and most of all to its characters. The only thing which makes this over-self indulgence piece work stack up was one name..Ellen Page. She shows that her way of acting was nothing short of spectacular. Here, it is another troubled teenage role that she can fit in at ease. Her performance is the only thing to tie up these fragment pieces to become at least a plausible piece of cinema.

The entire film lasted only 70 min. but even that would be too long for it. It should belong some sort of experimental films/moving image exercises that last less than 20 min. At most, this is a good try to use such editing innovative (Mike Figgis's "Timecode" (2000) is comparably more bearable than this)

(p.s. to those commercial operator in HK who try to act as a host of the film festival, can we please give some respect to all the production crews by showing all the credits after the film ends??? It is very rude and disrespectful to cut the film short by just showing the name of the directors at the end, and then rush all the audience out of the auditoriums!!)