A Cock and Bull Story

Last night I went to see Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story at the good old Arclight. Excellent film. Funny; clever; profound; chaotic. The movie is kind of like Naked Lunch for the Merchant-Ivory set: a highly self-reflexive adaptation of a supposedly "unfilmable" novel ... all structured as a "film-of-a-book-within-a-film-of-a-book".

I tend to find mise-en-abyme irritating in most movies, but Winterbottom and company did an expert job of using the device here. The novel has been described as a precursor to postmodernism: Tristram Shandy sets out to write the biography of his life, but through a series of digressions and allusions never gets beyond the moment of his birth. The movie's approach to this material is to add an extra layer: the story of a group of egotistical filmmakers trying to adapt the Tristram Shandy novel, but never getting beyond the birth scene. It's a clever device and the movie's narrative style is deliberately one of digression, allusion and evasion - which not only allows for a lot of self-depricating humor about filmmaking, but also allows for the more existential themes of the movie to play out in rich but unpretentious ways.

All in all, a fabulous movie ... and be sure to stay through the end credits for some of the most hilarious banter you'll ever hear.