Split personalities

>> Bruce McDonald goes cubist with his tale
of tortured youth, The Tracey Fragments

by MATTHEW HAYS

Bruce McDonald says that ever since he watched The Thomas Crown Affair, he couldn’t get the use of split-screen out of his head. In that 1968 film, director Norman Jewison used the split-screen device to show us a jewel heist, and a relationship between stars Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, unfold from two different perspectives simultaneously.

McDonald, the man behind such landmark indie films as Highway 61 and Hard Core Logo, says he began to employ the technique in a number of his projects, including the doc Road Songs: A Portrait of Robbie Robertson (2001) and the Juliette Lewis film Picture Claire (2001).

Then he asked an editor he often collaborated with, Jeremiah Munce, if he felt that split-screen would be possible throughout an entire film. Munce was intrigued, but said the project would have to fit the style. When filmmaker John L’Ecuyer handed McDonald the Maureen Medved novel The Tracey Fragments, McDonald felt he had the perfect material for a split-screen extravaganza.

“To me, it seemed a good fit. It’s a perfect story: it’s about a young person who is trying desperately to put the pieces together of how she lost track of her brother. And the title was screaming at me. I thought we could do a cubist film, a pop art film, or a combination of both.”

Trouble and torment

In the film, Ellen Page plays the teenage Tracey, who begins to go over the deep end mentally, after her younger brother disappears. She leaves the repressive confines of her small town to head to Winnipeg, where the tortured girl only finds more trouble and torment. Every now and then, she’s convinced she sees her missing brother somewhere, and tries desperately to track him down.

The split-screen in Tracey Fragments has a head rush effect. Audiences are bombarded with the messed up interior of our heroine, as her own identity clashes with that of a brutal external reality. “Usually, the split-screen is used to convey more information. But instead of trying to show more, we thought more along the lines of the ripple effect. We wanted to show the effects of throwing one stone in the water. Like a piece of music, where there’s a good part, but with no lyrics. It was about style.”

But there was still convincing to be done, when McDonald headed into production. “I told the editors that we would shoot for two and a half weeks, with two cameras. Then I gave Jeremiah [and his co-editors Gareth Scales and Matt Hannam] two months to put it together. Jeremiah was really the architect. If it didn’t work when we looked at it, then we would have gone back and done it more traditionally. But when we saw it, it really connected.”

Was McDonald ever worried The Tracey Fragments would end up looking too gimmicky? “That was a concern right from the beginning.”

All about Ellen

At least part of the solution, he says, arrived with his central casting call. “Ellen really is an amazing actress. We followed her instincts very closely, her emotional leads. Even if people haven’t liked the style of this film, they’ve all connected with her. We were lucky to have Ellen as the antenna of the film—emotionally and visually, she’s the eye of the hurricane.”

And McDonald concedes he was concerned about the style of the film overtaking the content. “Ellen made sure that the content was the strongest. In a sense, the style gives the audience the sense of what it is to be her, to be suffering what it is she’s going through. If it was all about style, then what you might end up with is a fast-food meal. But I think it captures the essence of the terrible emotional confusion she’s suffering.”

I have to ask about McDonald’s own bipolar career. He goes from making deeply personal, low-budget projects (like Fragments and Roadkill) to doing TV work (like Queer As Folk and Degrassi). The last time I interviewed McDonald was in the summer of 2006, when he was in Montreal to shoot the made-for-TV disaster-movie-inspired mini-series Killer Wave.

“You know, I actually enjoy working on projects like that. If it weren’t for those more commercial films and TV shows I couldn’t make films like The Tracey Fragments. The films that are close to my heart are my great romantic passion. But the more commercial stuff are my illicit affairs.”

The Tracey Fragments
opens this Friday, Nov. 2

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