The Tracey Fragments
Because this film is literally a spliced collage of various film fragments in no particular order, it is difficult to give a full synopsis, but there is a story to it all.Fifteen-year -old Tracy Birkowitz is a caustic, sarcastic, vulgar and spoiled teenager, living in Toronto, Canada with her well-meaning but often verbally abusive, workaholic parents. Bullied in school, her day-to-day environment has obviously influenced her behavior. The film starts off with her riding the bus, giving a monologue, and film fragments are shown that depict her parents yelling harshly at her that if she isn't careful, she will be raped and murdered. It then shows her locked in a room, presumably a police station, and then it shows her parents again, shouting that they want to know where their son is.Tracy is responsible for losing her little brother, Sonny, a mentally-disabled boy who acts like a dog. As she says, he has disappeared without a trace, and he has never come back. She has run away from home herself and has become more or less a hobo.Much of the film is then taken up with Tracy's everyday world of riding the bus repeatedly, looking every day for her little brother. She avoids school and home, and when she does show up to school, her teachers turn a blind eye to her peculiar behavior. Her classmates dub her "the titless wonder", much to her annoyance. She tries to call home on a payphone and cries out for her mother, to no avail, eventually smashing the phone booth in rage. She also rescues a disheveled woman a little older than she is after she is kicked off the bus.Before Sonny disappeared, a fragment from earlier times is shown in which Tracy meets her one and only friend, Billy Zero, an enigmatic high-schooler who dresses in all black grunge and dates her briefly. Tracy loves him much more than Billy loves her, and from other fragments, it soon becomes apparent that although Billy likes Tracy, he is only interested in sex and that he doesn't have any real profound love for her. Tracy's fantasy is to be in a metal band with Billy under her imagined stage name, Estuary Palomino.As the film progresses, it is shown that Tracy's manly female psychiatrist is very little help to Tracy, and believes nothing she says, wanting her medicated. It is also revealed that Tracy has borderline personality disorder. Both her and Sonny, having grown up in a broken home, are troubled but too afraid to say why. Sonny's bizarre dog behavior, Tracy believes is her fault because "I hypnotized him to be a dog from now on", but it soon becomes apparent that Sonny might have been acting out and had run away from home to escape his overbearing family, especially since there is no real proof that he's mentally challenged. There is some implied past affair between the parents of the Berkowitz family, and that Sonny might be either adopted, or another woman's child after her father had an affair, as seen in a flashback where Tracy's dad tells her as a young child about Sonny's ambiguous origin, claiming that he once had a mother who loved him very much, and spinning some imaginary story about dogs and Eskimos. It is never made clear what exactly happened to Sonny in the past.Tracy is shown spending time on the streets and in the homes of a number of people who she thinks are her friends, mostly hipsters and junkies with similar lives to hers and not a lot of money or emotional support. Tracy witnesses physical violence, drug use, sex and booze in her new environment. Seeking out her psychiatrist for help in finding Sonny proves to not be useful at all, and since she has run away from home herself, she becomes worried that adults will prevent her from her search for Sonny. When Tracy is nearly raped in one of the apartments she is spending the night in, she escapes wearing no clothes, just a shower curtain around her shoulders. She then gets back on her favorite city bus.It is finally revealed how Tracy lost Sonny in a small flashback. Tracy obsesses over her body image because of her breast size, spending a lot of the film comparing hers to that of the other girls around her. Because of this, she thinks no guy will ever truly love her, nobody at all for that matter, because the only person who has ever shown her not sex but real friendship, was Sonny. Billy Zero gives her the sexual attention she desires, but her parents ground her to her room, jeopardizing her relationship with Billy. Thus, under the guise of "taking Sonny for a walk", she sneaks outside to meet Billy and have sex in the back of a car, leaving Sonny alone for what she thinks is only a few minutes. Before she knows what has happened, hours have slipped away from her - and so has Sonny.A final fragment shows Tracy wandering naked under her shower curtain, unresponsive, through a Toronto park at night. Throughout the film, Tracy is shown sitting in a strange white-walled room, either a police station or a mental hospital. Therefore it is implied that she will eventually be picked up and returned to safety, to get treatment for her problems and to be reunited with her parents. It is never said whether or not Sonny will ever return home. As Tracy's father says, a blizzard had ravaged Toronto in the time Sonny disappeared, so he might have gotten lost in the blizzard and died, sadly.
flashback