When is watching a movie like reading a novel?

 When the movie is Mike Figgis' Time Code, a curious technical undertaking that features four connected stories told simultaneously.

 Shot entirely with hand-held digital cameras, Time Code unfolds on a screen split four ways. The quadruple effect is initially disconcerting. How is one meant to watch four different stories at once? Slowly, a viewer falls into this thing not unlike the way a reader falls into a book.

 You have to pay attention to the characters. You need to engage your imagination. You have to decide where to look, and what to think. This is fairly unusual at the movies. It's also kind of cool. Whether or not it's earth-shattering is mostly in the eye of the beholder.

 Time Code is a very black comedy about a love triangle and the movie business. The stories and the characters are all connected, and Time Code stars Stellan Skarsgard as a hard-drinking movie exec, Saffron Burrows as his wife, Jeanne Tripplehorn as a controlling businesswoman and Salma Hayek as a kept woman and an actress. Slowly but surely, these characters move toward each other from four different directions, meeting in an explosive finale.

 Cameo appearances

 Sprinkled throughout are cameo appearances from Holly Hunter, Laurie Metcalf, Julian Sands, Glenne Headley, Danny Huston, Kyle MacLachlan, Leslie Mann, Alessandro Nivola, Viveka Davis, et al.

 Everybody involved helped create his or her own character, improvised action and came up with dialogue.

 The movie concerns a love triangle, ambition and revenge, but it is also a hilarious condemnation of the nonsense that goes on in the Hollywood movie business.

 Figgis, a filmmaker interested in synchronicity, reveals how 'coincidence' and timing work in real life and in real time. Because the four stories run without interruption, Time Code allegedly is not edited, but it is -- through sound. Which story you choose to watch is manipulated via music and dialogue, or their lack.

 Enough technical stuff. Time Code is engaging and often sexy, though the strange intimacy established between the viewer and the stories via this four-screen technique makes it difficult to escape the feeling of voyeurism at times.

 Without traditional editing, events in Time Code play out in an unusually compelling fashion. Still, a good story is a good story, and that's the end product a viewer sees.

 What's revolutionary about Time Code is mostly from a filmmaker's viewpoint and it's mostly technical. The advantage to an audience is a sudden understanding of the "less is more" concept.

 The cameras used to make Time Code are not the kind of digital cameras you have at home. They're specially-designed digital videocams. Don't try this at home, kids.

(This film is rated AA)

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