Intrigue

15-year-old Tracey Berkowitz is naked under a shower curtain at the back of a bus, looking for her little brother Sonny, who thinks he's a dog.

Tracey Berkowitz, 15, a self-described normal girl, loses her nine-year-old brother, Sonny. In flashbacks and fragments, we meet her overbearing parents and the sweet, clueless Sonny. We watch Tracey navigate high school, friendless, picked on and teased. She develops a thing for Billy Zero, a new student, imagining he's her boyfriend. We see the day she loses Sonny and we watch her try to find him. In bits and pieces, we see what leads up to her riding in the back of a city bus wrapped in a shower curtain. Coming of age, or just surviving?—<jhailey@hotmail.com>

Living in Winnipeg, Tracey Berkowitz relays fragments of her life in a fragmented manner. She considers herself a normal fifteen year old in hating herself and hating her life. She has a dysfunctional relationship with her parents who treat her with disdain while they themselves have their own dysfunctional marriage. They have placed her in therapy with Dr. Heker, she believing to absolve themselves of any responsibility when she turns psycho. She in turn believes the therapy useless especially in Dr. Heker being more concerned about getting her $80/hour fee than about Tracey as a patient. Tracey often rides the bus at night with no set destination solely to be with other depressed people. She is bullied at school for her non-caring androgyny, specifically by the boys in not yet having developed physically among a classful of buxom and overtly feminine female classmates. The one bright light is her fantasy of being in a loving, committed relationship with Billy Zero, a classmate new to her school, it unclear if she realizes that it is not reality. This phase of her life is set against the backdrop of her own measures to find her missing nine year old brother, Sonny Berkowitz, Tracey who her parents blame for him being missing in the first place in Sonny following Tracey out of the house - when Tracey was grounded - in Sonny and Tracey's continuing game of he pretending to be her dog.—Huggo

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 Tracey Berkowitz is a caustic, sarcastic, vulgar and spoiled teenager, living in Winnipeg, Manitoba 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.

Tracey is responsible for losing her nine-year-old brother, Sonny, who often 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 Tracey'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 Tracey meets her one and only friend, Billy Zero, an enigmatic high-schooler who dresses in all black grunge and dates her briefly. Tracey loves him much more than Billy loves her, and from other fragments, it soon becomes apparent that although Billy likes Tracey, he is only interested in sex and that he doesn't have any real profound love for her. Tracey'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 Tracey's manly female psychiatrist is very little help to Tracey, and believes nothing she says, wanting her medicated. It is also revealed that Tracey 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, Tracey 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 Tracey'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.

Tracey 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. Tracey 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, however the psychiatrist kindly advises Tracey to go home and to tell her parents how she really feels. Tracey goes back out onto the streets and since she has run away from home herself, she becomes worried that adults will prevent her from her search for Sonny. When Tracey 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. When she is denied the option of living with her psychiatrist, Tracey lashes out and cusses while having violent mood swings.

It is finally revealed how Tracey lost Sonny in a small flashback. Tracey obsesses over her body image because of her small 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 Tracey wandering naked under her shower curtain, unresponsive, through a Winnipeg park at night. Throughout the film, Tracey 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 by Dr. Heker 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 Tracey's father says, a blizzard had ravaged Winnipeg in the time Sonny disappeared, so he might have gotten lost in the blizzard and died, sadly.