10 April 2012

God bless Mike Figgis. Just when you had given up hope of ever seeing the words "film", "experimental" and "Brit" in the same sentence, up he comes with this gallant effort - a work that can only be described as an experimental film by a Brit director.

But just how experimental is it? We've seen films in which actors have improvised all their dialogue; we've seen the screen split into four sections and watched them projected simultaneously; we've even seen entire feature films shot in one continuous take.

What we haven't seen is all of the above in the same movie. Having gathered an impressive ensemble of actors - Stellan Skarsgard, Holly Hunter, Salma Hayek, Saffron Burrows and Julian Sands - well, OK, quite an impressive array of actors, Figgis has taken free expression as his starting point and gradually pulled the elements together in a loose confection set in and around a Hollywood studio. Here, a bunch of fretful executives are awaiting the arrival of the studio head - Skarsgard - who is falling apart from a combination of drugs, alcohol, women and boredom. Beyond the confines of the studio, various characters are converging for auditions, meetings, random encounters and/or sexual liaisons. The tone is easily as bitter as Altman's The Player, but the style is infinitely more playful and the content much funnier.

The most extraordinary aspect of the film is not the experimental process but the fact that the results are quite easily viewable; there are very few moments when your senses - prompted by the sound mix or a camera movement - do not know on which screen to focus. And although the story is necessarily loose, it does unfold and reach some kind of logical conclusion. If Andy Warhol had lived and moved to Hollywood, this might have been the kind of movie he'd be making today.

Timecode
Cert: 15

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