Fun and infuriating in roughly equal proportions, Mike Figgis’s Time Code is an unusually bold experiment for a major studio. Its plot is outlandish and its characters the most overblown parodies this side of Robert Altman. In some respects, it’s even more cockamamy than James Toback’s Black and White and its sensationalist riffs. So you can’t laugh at much of it without feeling either self-satisfied or stupid.
The whole thing calls to mind a hyperbolically overdetermined board game with four squares, punctuated by no less than four earthquakes–each one providing a formal marker as well as a sensationalist frisson (and an effective means of coordinating the narrative developments in all four frames). The upper right square, the first to appear on-screen, is occupied by Emma Green (Figgis regular Saffron Burrows), the troubled wife of philandering movie producer Alex Green (Stellan Skarsgard), who tends to occupy the lower right square. Emma recounts a dream to a therapist, walks a few blocks to Red Mullet to see Alex briefly and discuss a planned visit to Tuscany (just in time for earthquake number two), then proceeds to Book Soup, where she meets a blond actress who’s just auditioned at Red Mullet with director Lester Moore (Richard Edson) for a part in Bitch From Louisiana; eventually the two women walk to the blond’s apartment for some tentative love play.
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Though he hasn’t seen Out 1, Figgis does seem aware of some of the Bazinian issues it raises. Unfortunately, the defeatist and postmodernist notion of capitalism absorbing and thereby defeating every attempt at revolutionary change–another prominent theme in Ana’s sales pitch–seems much more relevant to the limitations of Time Code as an experimental undertaking. It’s too bad that Figgis’s previous feature–a version of Strindberg’s Miss Julie that uses split-screen techniques–has opened locally only in the suburbs and wasn’t screened for the Chicago press, because Figgis has said that, along with one of his much earlier forays as a stage director, it shows us where much of Time Code comes from. (In terms of film precedents, he has also cited Napoleon and Woodstock, but not The Chelsea Girls or Forty Deuce.) But attempting to connect this film with film history in general, which Ana’s pitch obliges us to do, only emphasizes what’s shallow about it.
No such problem is posed by Alexei Guerman’s brilliant, grim, and madly intractable Khroustaliov, My Car! (1998), playing this week at Facets Multimedia, about which I’d prefer to say as little as possible–in part because the film says and does so much I couldn’t begin to know how to paraphrase its discourse or activities. Like some Fellini films, it’s autobiographically based yet phantasmagoric in feeling. Most of it is set in February 1953, during the last gasp of Stalin’s rule, and focuses on a brain surgeon/former alcoholic/Red Army general sent to the gulag because he has Jewish relatives. At least I think that’s why he’s sent; the paranoid atmosphere keeps everything fairly uncertain and sinister, and my second look at the film left me no wiser about the plot than my first.
