Innovative improvisation

By STEVE PERSALL, Times Film Critic

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 26, 2000

Time Code is an inspired concept in film, with four scenes playing out at the same time.

Even when Time Code gets on your nerves, it is obvious that director Mike Figgis is accomplishing something special.

Like Magnolia, this film abandons conventional narrative patterns for something dreamier. The freedom of movement (and, by extension, improvised expression) provided by digital video cameras recalls The Blair Witch Project. Yet, the manner in which director Mike Figgis stretches these precedents has never been attempted before.

Time Code is boldly experimental filmmaking from an artist with enough clout that he doesn't need to be doing this. Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas) has a vision -- four of them to be exact -- and it is exciting to watch them materialize, as close to precision as this loose-limbed project can expect.

Figgis' creative template will inspire arguments and imitators for years. He gathered a fine cast of actors for one day of filming last October. Ninety-six minutes, to be exact. Four hand-held digital cameras operated non-stop while they improvised everything, guided only by Figgis' rudimentary plot outline. None of the footage has a single edit.

Instead, all four images are projected at once onto a theater screen divided into equal quadrants for the occasion. Four different perspectives on the same characters and settings, occasionally crossing from one frame to another, sometimes just being there.

The opening credits serve as viewer orientation, demonstrating how changing the volume at key times will draw attention to whichever frame is important at the moment. Or else, Figgis fills a screen with nothingness, a cue that our eyes can focus someplace else. As always, music is vital to Figgis, whose taste for free-form jazz extends to his execution of this idea.

Time Code plays smoother than its description. Viewers can easily track the multi-character studies and how they relate to each other, if at all. With the proper timing, something occurs in one picture frame that links to another, and we get the cognitive rush of puzzle pieces fitting together. Movie mysteries pull off these "a-ha" moments regularly, but this is a deeper sense of discovery, making a viewer feel smarter for noticing.

Figgis' process is more meaningful than the story he tells. This is, after all, an experiment in structure. If Time Code were edited into a traditional movie format, this would be soap opera, a romantic triangle gilded by drug addiction, murder and 42nd Street-style instant stardom. The mundane becomes remarkable, though, as Figgis fiddles with cinema customs.

Three central characters emerge: Rose (Salma Hayek) is an aspiring actor in a rocky romance with wealthy, possessive Lauren (Jeanne Tripplehorn). Lauren suspects Rose is having an affair. She is, with movie producer Alex (Stellan Skarsgard), whose cocaine use has increased after splitting with his wife. Rose visits Alex's production offices supposedly for an audition but really for a tryst. Lauren waits outside in the limo, hearing the truth through a bugging device.

Meanwhile, Alex's co-workers swap career worries and pitches for facile movie ideas, the kind of disposable entertainment that sent Figgis running to this new territory. Holly Hunter and Steven Weber poke fun at the blockbuster mentality of Hollywood. Julian Sands plays New Age massage therapist to everyone, a silly bribe from someone who wants a script produced.

The cast is remarkably adept at improvisation, and Hayek is especially impressive in the role with the widest dramatic arc. Everyone's enthusiasm about this project is obvious and infectious.

Figgis is also to be commended for not taking himself too seriously. Four earthquakes rattle Alex's studio, satirizing the notion that Figgis shakes up tradition with his gambit. Actors inject sly lines that could be taken as ridicule for doing this project. Later, a self-indulgent director pitches a movie idea that sounds exactly like the movie we're watching. "This is the most pretentious crap I've ever heard," Alex grumbles.

Some moviegoers will think the same. Time Code is too strange for mainstream tastes. More adventurous viewers can delight in witnessing the first bona fide breakthrough of cinema's second century. More can be done with the process than this, but Figgis invites some grand possibilities.

Time Code

• GRADE: A-
• DIRECTOR: Mike Figgis
• CAST: Salma Hayek, Stellan Skarsgard, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Saffron Burrows, Holly Hunter, Kyle MacLachlan, Julian Sands, Steven Weber
• SCREENPLAY: Improvised, based on a story outline by Mike Figgis
• RATING: R; profanity, sexual situations, drug abuse, brief violence
• RUNNING TIME: 96 min.