Timecode (2000)

Director:

Mike Figgis

Writer:

Mike Figgis (story)

Release Date:

28 April 2000 (USA)

Genre:

Drama

Tagline:

Four cameras. One take. No edits. Real time.

Plot:

Four frames of simultaneous action that alternately follow a smitten lesbian lover as she obsesses over her partner's dalliances and the tense goings-on of a Hollywood film production company.

Plot Keywords:

Real Time | Audition | Jealousy | Lesbian | Split Screen

Awards:

2 nominations

Cast

Xander Berkeley	...	Evan Wantz
Golden Brooks	...	Onyx Richardson
Saffron Burrows	...	Emma
Viveka Davis	...	Victoria Cohen
Richard Edson	...	Lester Moore
Aimee Graham	...	Sikh Nurse
Salma Hayek	...	Rose
Glenne Headly	...	Therapist
Andrew Heckler	...	Auditioning Actor
Holly Hunter	...	Executive
Danny Huston	...	Randy
Daphna Kastner	...	Auditioning Actor
Patrick Kearney	...	Drug House Owner
Elizabeth Low	...	Penny - Evan's Assistant
Kyle MacLachlan	...	Bunny Drysdale

Also Known As:

Time Code (USA) (alternative spelling)
Time Code 2000 (USA) (working title)

MPAA:

Rated R for drug use, sexuality, language and a scene of violence.

Runtime:

97 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital | SDDS

Certification:

Singapore:M18 | Canada:14A (Canadian Home Video rating) | Australia:MA | France:U | Norway:15 | Sweden:11 | UK:15 | USA:R (#37352)

Filming Locations:

8800 W. Sunset Boulevard, West Hollywood, California, USA

Company:

Screen Gems

Trivia:

There was a golden rule. Mike Figgis told the actors to never wear exactly the same outfit every day over the two-week shooting period. This way there could never ever be the possibility of stealing a scene from another day's shoot and cheating it in the edit.

Goofs:

Revealing mistakes: When Laura is standing outside the offices during the first earthquake, she calls out "Salma!" instead of the character's name, "Rose".

Quotes:

Darren: Did you look at Tower Records, cause they just re-released ABBA's greatest hits.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Film Geek (2005)

Soundtrack:

Future Strings

The title gives the game away.

"Timecode". What does this have to do with the content of Figgis's film? As we discover towards the end, without any chance of our being mistaken, nothing. It must be a reference to whatever device Figgis used to synchronise his actors. And that lets us know where his interests lay: in filming four simultaneous, 97-minute takes - certainly not in telling a decent story.

This lack of concern for anything except the technical challenge - we don't even get a sense of exhilaration at seeing Figgis pull it off - could not be more naked. On four occasions, there's an earth tremor. How do these little earthquakes help the film or the viewer? Not in the least - but it helps Figgis synchronise his actors. (Can you think of a LESS creative way of working a necessary synchronising device into the - cough - story? I can't.) Characters from different frames bump into one another now and then, and sometimes this serves an artistic purpose. Equally often, however, it doesn't. The characters aren't interacting; the actors are reminding one another which bit they're up to.

And here's the moment that really gives the game away. Towards the end, in the two bottom frames, we see a young director pitching her idea for a new kind of movie - and it turns out that she wants to make "Timecode"! Wow, self-reference! The last, and this case probably the first, refuge of the creatively bankrupt. I wanted to swear out loud. I'd been waiting over an hour for some payoff, some tiny sign of confluence between Figgis's four-frame device and the (cough) story he was trying to tell with it, and THIS is the best he could do? To add insult to injury, the movie our young director was pitching wasn't QUITE "Timecode". It was better. It had music by Hans Eisler, for one thing. (Apart from the melody sung during this pitch, the music in "Timecode" is banal, and it's used with a ham-fisted incompetence that has to be heard to be believed.) Also, our young director had a neat idea. She wanted to adapt a Borges story in which an old man and a young man meet, chat, and gradually discover that they're the very same person, at different stages of his life. "Each of the four main characters," continues our young director, "will be the same person, at a different stage of life." At this point our eyes scan the four frames to see if this is true of "Timecode", at least metaphorically. No, it isn't. Not even metaphorically. I felt like beating my head against the chair in front of me. Why was I watching Figgis's wretched movie? I wanted to watch HER movie!

As the young director points out, this kind of thing is the offspring of digital technology. Well, not quite. Alfred Hitchcock came up with the idea of a film without cuts in the 1940s, and more or less put it into practise with "Rope". It goes without saying that "Rope" is far superior. The irony is that it's also far truer to Figgis's avowed ideal of perfect continuity. In "Timecode" a vertical slash and a horizontal slash divide the screen into four. EVERY FRAME is cut into pieces - Hitchcock merely had a discreet, and to the best of his ability invisible, cut every ten minutes or so. (He also had a story, but I should stop harping on that.) Talk about a bad bargain. And it gets worse. The digital technology that makes Figgis's inferior vision possible also makes every frame look ugly. Add the fact that nothing worth looking at is going on in any of them, and what do we get? Instead of one good thing, a choice between four worthless things.

It may not have escaped your attention that the last few years have produced a pretty poor crop of films. 1999 was the worst year in living memory - unless you were exceptionally old in 1999, and could remember the transition to sound - and 2000 turned out, contrary to all reasonable expectation, to be worse. Even regression to the mean gives us little reason to hope that 2001 will be any better. Yet every so often a film comes along that makes the future seem even bleaker. "The Blair Witch Project" promised us nothing but incompetence from the next generation of film-makers; "The Phantom Menace" let the world know just how successful a technically sophisticated, creatively barren rip-off could be; "Scary Movie" introduced us to the novel idea of comedy without any actual humour. "Timecode" is yet another depressing sign of things to come. I'm sick of them.