As a teenager Duncan Roy escaped the London working class by passing himself off as a British noble and infiltrating the high society of Paris and New York; he got away with it for five years before he was busted for fraud. Now a veteran playwright and stage director, Roy makes his feature film debut with this lacerating British drama (2002) based on his experiences as an impostor. It was shot on video and transferred to celluloid in triptych form, a technical gambit that yields mixed results: the small panels and low image resolution make it something of a chore to watch, but there’s also some highly expressive overlapping and staggering of the action. In contrast to Mike Figgis’s multipanel experiment Timecode, however, Roy’s story is fascinating in its own right, exploring the hero’s mingled shame over his class background and homosexuality, and painting a vicious portrait of Britain’s coke-snorting upper crust in the late 70s. 118 min. Facets Cinematheque.