Tick ... tick ... tick.

Time code offers us four points of view--including a volatile lesbian relationship--with not much going on

Leaving Las Vegas, for all its merits, was not the sort of film that would augur a spate of queer-friendly movies. (Has any Nicolas Cage movie done that?) And yet director Mike Figgis chose to follow up his booze-soaked hit with a series of experiments in storytelling that featured gay characters in strategic roles, notably One Night Stand and The Loss of Sexual Innocence.

Those pictures were mere benchwarmers for the combustible relationship shared by Jeanne Tripplehorn and Salma Hayek in this past year's Time Code, one of the more significant developments in gay inclusion by a straight filmmaker and arguably one of the more pretentious. Figgis split his screen into four quadrants to show a quartet of concurrently happening, ultimately intertwining scenarios surrounding a Los Angeles film production company. Using digital video to shoot all four segments simultaneously in real time, Time Code offers a mildly satirical glimpse into the daily human comedy of the industry.

In this fashion, Saffron Burrows cries to therapist Glenne Headly over her troubled marriage to Stellan Skarsgard while the offending Skarsgard is glimpsed in a lower frame. A crowd of movers and shakers watches the dailies from a new picture in one frame while, in an adjacent frame, Skarsgard cheats on Burrows with an actress behind the screening room screen.

At the center of all this activity (or, rather, up to the left and down to the right) are Tripplehorn and Hayek as a Hollywood player and her actress lover (the same actress who is messing around with Skarsgard, get it?). Tripplehorn and Hayek are a dream couple--Figgis does know how to play up to homo fantasy. They fight, kiss, and make up; then Tripplehorn spends the better part of the movie sitting in the back of a limousine, chewing gum and looking pissed off.

For all its comings and goings, tantrums and showdowns, T/me Code is finally about how a spoiled rich Hollywood lesbian learns how to get out of a limo and walk tall on a sidewalk. While Figgis's multiple-flame technique makes for some clever juxtapositions, we're left with a dubious circle of characters and melodramatic folderol that would beg our patience were it told in a conventional format. Would But I'm a Cheerleader magically turn into Oscar fodder were it chopped into a dozen frames, re-mastered for Sensurround, and accompanied by scratch-and-sniff cards? (Well, at least it would have been more fun.)

The technical achievement that is Time Code defies a DVD and VHS reduction, even if you own the Giant Screen That Ate the Living Room. The one home theater advantage I can think of is that it may be the first movie that could only be enhanced by chatting on your cell phone at the same time.

Find more on Time Code and other gay and lesbian films at www.advocate.com

Stuart is film critic and senior film writer at Newsday.