Home
sign up| features / interview |
 content by: editor |
 a cock and bull story
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Michael Winterbottom’s freewheeling literary non-adaptation. A film about the difficulties of finishing said film, with actors playing themselves, based on the infamous novel about the vagaries of completing an account of one’s own life story - talk about an opportunity for self-indulgent filmmakers playing with themselves: not so much a method of examining Laurence Sterne’s The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman; more a recipe for a hand shandy.What a relief then, to find that Michael Winterbottom’s A Cock And Bull Story is an astute, mischievous and frequently hilarious refracted filmic update in the spirit of what Sterne attempted in his infamous nine-volume 18th-century masterpiece. Described as “a postmodern classic written way before there was any modernism to be post about”, ostensibly Tristram Shandy is an autobiography narrated by the eponymous Yorkshire nobleman (Coogan). It quickly becomes apparent that compressing and ordering one’s life into linear form is a fool’s errand, as Shandy gets waylaid into freestyling digressions on, among other things, life, birth, death and the finer points of re-enacting war battles in the garden, as his oddball Uncle Toby (Rob Brydon) does. Winterbottom’s film starts as a straightforward Shandy adaptation, before delving behind the scenes into a film-within-a-film, wherein rival co-stars “Steve Coogan” and “Rob Brydon”, plus the rest of the cast and crew - including a Who’s Who of modern British comedy with the likes of Dylan Moran, David Walliams and Ronnie Ancona - struggle with their own personal and professional foibles. Particulary Coogan, whose vanity, Hollywood aspirations and extra-marital involvements are mercilessly mocked. Given Coogan’s real-life tabloid headlines, wasn’t this taking the whole art-imitating-life gambit a step too far?  “If you try and do something adventurous or different, you’re always going to run the risk of falling on your arse,” admits Coogan. “And I was aware of that with this, certainly. But I understand what Michael was trying to do. He was trying to use aspects of me playing myself to resonate with the subject matter of the book, and I trust him. I probably wouldn’t have done it with anyone else.” In fact, Coogan’s bigger problem, after this and another earlier role as himself in Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee And Cigarettes, isn’t that audiences can’t differentiate between him and his “Steve Coogan” screen persona, but rather they can’t believe him in any other roles. Ah, the problems of autobiographic representation. You know that Laurence Sterne would be completely in his element.
Leigh Singer
A Cock And Bull Story, on selected release 20 January 06.
 comments
Read members' comments related to this interview.
comment by flyingtwinkle
Jul 15, 2006
This is a film about the troubles of making a film about a book about the troubles of writing a book.Nobody has ever made afilm before with matafiction 200 years ahead of times, a prank,
|
 |
books  books and comics archive Author interviews and reviews from 2002 to 2008. |
send to a friend
lff 05
access 1000s of articles
