"Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story": A Tale of Failure and Impotency By Firat Yucel

There are more than enough movies about people who achieve great things in uneasy circumstances. The world’s fastest Indian, against all the odds, breaking the speed record with a 1920 Indian motorcycle… The story of Kinsey, the honorable fight against Puritanism… The stories of mathematicians, the proofs of genius…

On the other hand inability has always been one of the main motives of comedy. Nevertheless to transform this comedy tradition into something meaningful is quiet challenging. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story is a tale of inability; it’s about not being able to focus, not being able to adapt the legendary novel to cinema… However, it’s also about the everyday inabilities; the incapability of an individual to draw a line between private life and work life, the feeling of impotency and inferiority, the inability of someone to refrain from egocentrism and narcissism… On one level, it’s about cinema and representation, and on the other it’s more about everyday struggles, the banality of day-to-day social activity. It is a film that is capable of portraying its main character’s frustration and self-centered perspective with no more than nonsense talk about a shoe, but it’s also — consciously — a failed attempt to construct a life into a story, into a coherent narrative. In fact, like the book itself, the main thing that Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story tells us is that it is impossible to put a lifetime experience into the limits of a constructed narrative.

Its deconstructed and fragmented narrative doesn’t aim to break the patterns, but rather points out the inability of any form of representation (whether literature or cinema) to portray life as it is, as fragmented and as detached as it is… As Murathan Mungan said, “It’s not postmodernism which tore the world to pieces, the world was already fragmented.” One can say this movie is about a postmodern novel written in a time when there was nothing to post about, as Steve Coogan does in the movie (actually we learn that line was not in the script, it was made up by Coogan, who didn’t read the novel, like the character he plays in the movie). However, one can also say that this movie is about this condition itself, the inevitable failure of any representation to portray the world as fragmented as it is…

Winterbottom’s Story

Michael Winterbottom himself is a kind of a director who is difficult to categorize. Like the movie itself, his filmography seems to be unfocused. It’s hard to find a center to his body of work. He shoots constantly, without hesitation, very different movies, in various genres. He is familiar with success and failure. The five recent movies he made, including Tristram Shandy, were all written by Frank Cottrell Boyce, except Nine Songs, which he wrote himself. This collaboration between Winterbottom and Boyce is quiet different from the usual director-scriptwriter collaborations. It’s as if they always try to push the limits, and try to make something different each time they work together. The only thing that one can be sure about is that a Winterbottom-Boyce project is that it will be very different from the previous movies they made together. It can be a conventional but strong adaptation, reminiscent of old western movies like The Claim, or an ironic and sarcastic movie about pop music, which has a kind of documentary look to it like 24 Hour Party People, or it can be sci-fi which talks about identity, memory, borders and citizenship like Code 46. Nine Songs is a story of a relationship that is mostly driven by sex, but it is also about identity, the state of not belonging anywhere, memory and all the other themes that reminds us of Code 46; and a film on the power of music to inspire, just like 24 Hour Party People. All these films are very different from each other, but they have their connection points, which may or may not be deliberate. Nine Songs has its parallels with Code 46 in its way of portraying the human body; and Code 46, even though it’s a futuristic movie, has many political references about borders and citizenship which reminds us of In This World. Studying Winterbottom’s filmography, one can see, how a director who doesn’t like to calculate, who works constantly and instinctively, can provide a body of work that stands as a proof that everything is different and connected at the same time…

2005 and 2006 have become the years of success for Winterbottom. With The Road to Guantanamo, he won the best director prize at 56. Berlin Film Festival with the co-director Mat Whitecross. Yet his previous movie Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story which won the FIPRESCI prize in the 25. Istanbul Film Festival, is not to be underestimated. Apart from all its fun and playful narration, Tristram Shandy also proves to be a film about screen identity and the limits of representation…

A Coogan Film

No doubt that, apart from being a Winterbottom-Boyce film, Tristram Shandy is a Steve Coogan film. With 24 Hour Party People, Winterbottom and Boyce created a screen persona for Steve Coogan and that persona was exercised by other directors as well. It is clear that the Steve Coogan we know from films like 24 Hour Party People, Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes and TV shows ultimately dominates the movie Tristram Shandy. We don’t know if the real Steve Coogan is like the one we see on the screen: Sarcastic, over-ironic, cynical, egoistic, who has a great tendency to dominate and inspire people but who is also weak and competitive. A character created in the movies, which has an obsession about potency. What Winterbottom does best in Tristram Shandy is to use Coogan’s screen persona and blend his ‘ego story’ with the elements of the novel. He uses the novels complexity to reflect the uneasiness of Coogan’s “real life”. Some postmodern movies use “real life” to reflect the complexity of literary inspiration; Tristram Shandy reshapes this cliché of postmodern filmmaking and catches everyday life’s rhythm and complexity with the novel’s inspiration.

It’s a film that reflects upon “the present” with an extremely creative life portrait provided in “the past”. Therefore, the movie has nothing to do with nostalgia or retro inclinations of postmodern cinema or timelessness. The only realm in which Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story stands, is the present. Of course, the film within the film, works as a narrative on its own, especially in the first half hour of the movie, but the main concern is always on Steve Coogan’s personal life. All the scenes about injuring the penis and childbirth are a way of reflecting Coogan’s masculine anxieties. The images of birth are a kind of absurd reference to Coogan’s immaturity and the need for potency. Walter’s reaction to the fact of being father, somehow resembles Coogan’s attitude to his wife (or girlfriend) and his son. He finds himself in a situation where the role he plays and his real life inevitably overlaps. The paranoid dream scene in which he sees himself extremely small inside a fake uterus, reflects his inner anxieties of being a father, his futile effort to separate private life and work life, his attraction to other women and of course his jealousy about Rob Brydon who has the chance of acting with Gillian Anderson.

The first thing we see, when the movie switches from the film being shot, to the film set itself, is Coogan flirting with an assistant and introducing the assistant to his wife. In a quite ironic manner, he makes a joke that indicates he is flirting with the assistant, but the tone of irony disguises that it is actually the truth. The main difference of Tristram Shandy from the earlier movies that used Coogan’s persona is that for the first time this film puts Coogan in a position where his irony and cynicism doesn’t work to disguise the facts of life.

Picking the Pieces of “8 1/2”

This great carnival which stands in between representation and reality, which plays with all the absurdities and inner conflicts of this duality can be seen as a demystified 8 1/2. The play between real life and representation, which is the core of the movie, is evident even in the first scene, in which we see Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon facing a mirror, trying to imagine their roles and their representations, which will be presented in the movie. This scene with all its sarcasm and fun reflects how absurd it is to act in a movie. Tristram Shandy shows the moments where one thinks that everything about filmmaking is nonsense and trivial. Quite differently from Fellini’s 8 1/2, which somehow mystifies the filmmaking process and gives it a value of reflecting inner struggles and childhood dreams; Tristram Shandy demystifies the process by decomposing the narrative into a “movie that went wrong”, and then collects all the pieces of this shattered narrative, slowly building a tale about failure, impotency, art, anti-art, trivia and screen-based identity. It is 8 1/2 distilled from magic, which in return creates its own enchantment from the broken pieces.