Director: Mike Figgis
Stars: Salma Hayek, Richard Edson, Leslie Mann, Xander Berkeley, Golden Brooks, Julian Sands, loads of other people.
Timecode is an unusual and interesting film that follows the lies and intrigue prevalent on a set of a movie. What makes the film unique is that the screen is split into four parts, so the audience is asked to concentrate on four different screens at once. At first this seems daunting but it’s not as difficult to keep track of the different threads of the story as you may assume. A lot of the characters overlap and it’s clever to see how they interconnect, especially when the same scene is shown from two different perspectives. A note at the end says that each quarter was filmed in one continuous take and the performances were improvised from a skeletal framework, so on a technical level Timecode is astounding. I can’t imagine the work that must have gone into keeping track of everything and making sure that everything was paced correctly.
However, is it actually a worthwhile film to watch if you disregard the technical innovations? I’m not so sure. Some of the storylines are interesting and the actors certainly commit to the material, but I think if you watched it as a normal film it would be boring. It’s very cliché and most of the interest comes from watching how the different frames intersect across the screen. I think the director was aware of the difficulties in keeping the audience invested, as for a lot of the film two of the four screens are simply showing people sitting around, so really we don’t have to keep track of four frames, just two. At first it seems like it’s going to be a pretentious film concerned with people’s self-absorption and melodramatic problems but as the film progressed I became more engaged with the characters, and it wasn’t as slow or meandering as I initially thought it would be.
I did love seeing how the stories came together, and there were some hilarious moments, Julien Sands played a masseuse and he had some of the best moments.
In its execution Timecode is unlike any film I’ve seen. In substance it is okay, but the plot is unoriginal. I’m not sure I’d want to watch every film like this but I’d be interested to see what it would be like to watch a film in this way that wasn’t specifically made to be watched this way. As it is, it’s not demanding to watch and it doesn’t require as much concentration as you might initially think, but it is interesting to watch it and I’d definitely recommend you at least try, as you’ll be unlikely to find anything else like it.
