First, the plot. Alex (Stellan Skarsgaard) is a famous director who is also a drunk. His wife, Emma (Saffron Burrows), loves him, but knows he's seeing someone else. That person is Rose (Salma Hayek), an aspiring actress whose lover Loren (Jeanne Tripplehorn) suspects that she is seeing someone else. They are both right. We meet Loren as she is flattening the tires of Rose's car. She offers a ride to an audition, thinking that the "audition" is really a date. She is right, but Rose denies it. Meanwhile, Alex is screwing up at work, missing meetings and constantly tapping the bottle in his top drawer. Loren puts a listening device in Rose's purse and spends most of the movie listening in as Rose and Alex have sex. Rose wants an audition, and Alex has the power to get it for her but has not. He is a mess. Emma decides to leave him for good, and he is fending off the manipulative Rose while attempting to conduct business. He is supposed to meet with an up-and-coming digital video director, as well as assist in the production of a B-movie whose director is a cokehead, like many of the people in the film are. This is Hollywood!

All of that is sort of nonsense. The film's raison d'etre is its technique. The screen is split into four quarters, each of which follows a character over the 96 minutes of the film. It is shot in real time, with no cuts or second takes. When the film needs to follow a different character's action, the sound on the other three is muted. When a new character needs to be followed, there is a kind of hand off where one of the characters encounters the new person, then the camera follows the new person.

It was shot in digital video, giving the impression of watching someone's home movies. I hate the way digital video looks, especially with natural lighting and standard zoom like this film uses. Anybody who says differently is deluding themselves. The whole idea of the Dogma 95 group, who eschew artificial lighting and everything else that makes movies cinematic, seems patently ridiculous to me. Movies are supposed to be heightened reality. The sad thing is that the leader of the Dogmatics, Lars von Trier, was so good at using bizarre camera and effects work. Now that talent is lost to us, until he gets his fill of ugly movies about boring people. But I digress. I don't like the look of the film, and the sound was often hard to hear, making the story difficult to follow.

What was amazing about the film was the timing. I have heard it said that Figgis was conducting an orchestra of film, which precisely describes the film. The scenes are so well timed that it rarely seems like a character is sitting around waiting for a cue, since you tend to forget what they are doing when other things are going on. Would the film have been better using traditional editing techniques and film instead of video? Yes. Was it worth doing this way? Of course.