AKA

Running time: 118 minutes. Not rated (drugs, sex, nudity). At the Cinema Village, 12th Street, east of Fifth Avenue.

IF you're going to make another movie about a working-class bloke who fakes his way into high society (remember "The Talented Mr. Ripley"?), you'd better have a gimmick.

In "AKA," director-writer Duncan Roy presents his autobiographical variation on that theme on a fractured screen - three images at once, each giving a different perspective on the same incident.

It's something like what Abel Gance did in "Napoleon" way back in 1927.

Dean Page (Matthew Leitch) is a working-class British teenager who wants to go to college. His brutal dad has other ideas, and expresses them with great violence.

"You better get used to it, mate," he lectures. "This is it."

Mom, meanwhile, is deathly afraid of the old man.

When Dean - a character based on the director - falls in with some lecherous old gays who think he's so, so cute, Dad throws him out of the house.

Dean hightails it to the London gallery run by Lady Gryffoyn (Diana Quick), one of those people who think their you-know-what doesn't stink.

She gives Dean a job. Soon he's hobnobbing with Lady Gryffoyn's rich and obnoxious friends.

Next stop: France, where he takes to posing as Lady Gryffoyn's Etonian son and hanging out with an aristocratic (mostly gay) crowd fueled by Champagne and cocaine.

As Dean eventually learns, no good can come of this.

Roy's decision to gimmick it up works, for the most part.

Watching three frames at once is disconcerting at first, but eventually the experience gives the film a high-tech boost.

Leitch is impressive as his character goes from blue-collar nobody to high-society phony. The actor makes you pity Dean as he blindly bamboozles his way through life.

As Lady Gryffoyn, Quick seems to be loving every super-bitch minute she has on the screen.

On the down side, a subplot about a private eye hunting down Dean for credit-card fraud gets in the way. A little more editing would go a long way.

All in all, though, "AKA" is worth your $10.