Timecode (15), 93 minutes, City Screen, York, until next Thursday.

TIMECODE makes you work and here's how it works. On November 19 last year in Los Angeles, North Eastern director Mike Figgis filmed at four Los Angeles locations, close to each other, in real time, with no edits, in the manner of a surveillance camera.

Those sequences are run alongside each other in one 93-minute take on a screen divided into four separate but interlinking images, as Figgis lets off steam against Tinseltown by sending up casting sessions, film company meetings, alternative therapy, bored actresses and feckless relationships.

Call it cinema verit in the Nineties style of Scandinavia's Dogme 95 policy; call it four-play or a folly or a gimmick; even call it a "video version of Rear Window", as Figgis does, but certainly his novel conceit takes film-making into new organic, spontaneous, interactive territory.

As long ago as 1948, the ever innovative Alfred Hitchcock used a ten-minute take in Rope, a cinematically continuous sequence in one room designed to induce dizziness in the viewer.

Figgis's new-fangled box of tricks is initially similarly disorientating, starting off as a Tower of Babel as you attune to which screen to watch when. Like a Balearic DJ at the mixing desk, Figgis bleeds the sound levels together, until a dominant one emerges for the next significant story development, but equally the viewer is part of the editing process, on occasion selecting the mini-screen to follow closest or another screen to keep a distracted eye on.

Yet while eye and ear work overtime, the brain is not so taxed by Timecode and its superficial riff on The Player, Robert Altman's witty and constantly surprising 1992 satire on the Hollywood film industry.

Perhaps the lack of character depth among the cast of 27 is the inevitable consequence of the audacious filming technique, or may be it is another of Figgis's acerbic comments on the shallowness of Tinseltown.

Either way, it means Timecode is more enjoyable for its pioneering spirit than its linear story although Figgis's humour has a pleasingly playful and ironic tone, and so there is never the air of a dry experiment to his latter-day Feydeau farce.

You will note I haven't mentioned the cast yet. That's because the likes of Salma Hayek, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Saffron Burrows, Holly Hunter and the scene-stealing health guru Julian Sands are mere rats in Figgis's cage, like the contestants in the Big Brother compound. Still, as with BB, there is pleasure in knowing more than the participants in his game.