the anarchy of language

A Cock And Bull Story (Tristram Shandy) – Michael Winterbottom

Eric Morecombe, Andre Previn’s lapels in hand, responding to the maestro’s accusation that he has just played all the wrong notes, famously replies with mock menace – “No, I played all the right notes….but not necessarily in the right order”. An apt metaphor for the delicious wit and chronologically anarchic fun of this movie that wanders confidently between the comic mugging of Morecambe and Wise through irony and an appealing self-deprecatory bemusement of Steve Coogan’s Tristram. All to good effect. It is consistently funny and exploits its film-within-a-film structure with great style.

I haven’t read the book but having consulted a few reviews of the film feel as if I have. Not since Milo O’Shea lifted from my shoulders the guilty burden of actually ploughing through Joyce’s Ulysses, have I been so satisfyingly excused reading. Sterne’s apparently much loved but seldom read classic is described in ACABS as “post-modern before there was a modern.” As I find attaching any intelligible meaning to ‘post-modern’ one of life’s more arcane mysteries, I am clearly well equipped to appreciate the incisive appositeness of this witticism.

First things first. As the end credits roll, Rob Bryden and Steve Coogan discuss Bryden’s more than ordinary impersonation of Al Pacino. Coogan responds with a superb Pacino and wins hands, or larynx, down. This refers to banter half way through ACABS where half way through filming Tristram Shandy, Coogan and Bryden vie with each other for the attention of sexy PA Jennie (with an ‘e’).with whom Coogan has paddled in the shallows of a sexual Rubicon deterred from crossing by thoughts of Jenny (with a ‘y’) mother of his child and on a brief inconvenient, Rubicon-wise, visit to the set.

The ego-sparring between Coogan and Bryden works nicely with Coogan doing a riff on his up-himself egocentric luvvy from Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes. Sterne apparently had the prophetic realisation that the life to which art holds up its mirror, is merely a stream of conscious thoughts and capricious associations in response to a world where both events and actions are perplexingly random and beyond our rational control. His Tristram spends much time recounting events before and even during his own birth. Coogan slips comfortably between three roles – himself, Tristram and Tristram’s father Walter. Perhaps for the first time Sterne tried to describe the chaotic subjectivity of experience without imposing upon it a falsely ordered narrative. A witness to life rather than a teller of stories as we might say.

It is not surprising that such an elusive, eccentric book should arouse conflicting interpretations or responses. This too is used to good effect in ACABS with sudden script changes and radical shifts of emphasis adding to the erratic progress of the shoot. Someone loves the Widow Wadman character so Gillian Anderson is suddenly drafted in for pretty much an extended joke based upon Rob Bryden’s Captain Toby Shandy innnocently thinking her lusty desire see where he was injured in the war referred to where it happened not what it happened to. Much of this ends up on the editing room floor (the scene not the injured part) along with what Bryden calls the army of 10’s that he led into a totally unconvincing battle scene also abandoned with alacrity.

This kaleidoscopic narrative just floats from one episode in Tristram’s life, including foetal life, to another. On ACABS Director Jeremy Northam is breaking the rather predictable news to Coogan that the scene of Tristram’s swoosh down the mocked up womb and birth canal will require him to be naked. What else we might ask? And every male in the audience will wince at the toddler Tristram’s inadvertent circumcision by cordless sash window. Perhaps the only known example in the literary canon of defenestrated foreskin.

Lots of well known actors pop in to stir the ‘post-modern’ plot nicely along. (It’s OK, the one thing I have learned about ‘post-modern’ is that you don’t have to understand it to use it). Stephen Fry does Stephen Fry under the courtesy title of Parson Yorrick; and Shirley Henderson does a kind of Harry Potter Moaning Myrtle in long skirts displaying a feminine inscouciance to little Tristram’s unkindest cut of all that stirs rage in the soul of every red-blooded Gentile in the audience. We guys get attached to these little things.

Long experience of watching crap films has taught me that any movie described as ‘uproarious’ should be avoided at all costs as it is likely to be about as funny as Tristram’s encounter with the sash window. ‘Romp’ sends out pretty much the same dire warning. Though these spring to mind, Director Michael Winterbottom has, against all the odds, whipped up a movie cocktail of the droll, witty, arch, wickedly self-mocking and parodic that packs a comic punch from the first sip to the final swallow. Relax Mr Sterne – the boys done you proud. Great fun.

Filed under: 3 star, Comedy, Europe/World cinema, Fantasy, General, Humorous, Michael Winterbottm, Philosophical, Political