Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story - by Michael Winterbottom (2005)

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Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story - by Michael Winterbottom (2005)

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Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story - by Michael Winterbottom (2005)

Two actors, as their make up is applied, talk about the size of their parts. Then into the film: Laurence Sterne's unfilmable novel, Tristram Shandy, a fictive autobiography wherein the narrator, interrupted constantly, takes the entire story to be born. The film tracks between "Shandy" and behind the scenes. Size matters: parts, egos, shoes, noses. The lead's girlfriend, with their infant son, is up from London for the night, wanting sex; interruptions are constant. Scenes are shot, re-shot, and discarded. The purpose of the project is elusive. Fathers and sons; men and women; cocks and bulls. Life is amorphous, too full and too rich to be captured in one narrative.

Laurence Stern's "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" is considered the first meta-fiction novel. Written in the 1700's, before the phrase or even concept of 'meta-fiction' was born, it's the story – or, rather, Shandy's attempt to tell the story – of his life. But as all readers know, it's a work of epic digression, the tale of nearly everything else but the life of its title character. With invaluable assistance from his leads Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, Winterbottom has created a meta-film: a meditation on the novel that plays as a movie-within-a-movie. After setting up the conceit with a scene of the actors in make-up discussing the subtleties of billing, and the color of Brydon's teeth, we're cast into Sterne's knotty and bawdy world, brought to vivid life with all the technical sleight-of-hand film can offer. Coogan, as both Shandy and his father, narrates the story of his birth, popping in and out of scenes as character and actor, commenting on the proceedings, interrupting them, revising them. The backstory of the drama between the actors parallels that of the movie, especially the growing competition between Coogan and Brydon, and the numerous deviations of the director, the other actors, and the crew.

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Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story - by Michael Winterbottom (2005)

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Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story - by Michael Winterbottom (2005)

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Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story - by Michael Winterbottom (2005)

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Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story - by Michael Winterbottom (2005)

Close

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Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story - by Michael Winterbottom (2005)

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