no 6? A Cock and Bull Story
Jan. 31st, 2006 12:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
green_amberOk I have a theory about this one.
I think he's (Michael Winterbotton, the director) trying to demonstrate that naturalism/narrativism vs postmodernism isn't an on-off, digital, 1 or 0 , choice. That postmodernism, and uber-reality film, are both about recognising that there are shades of reality, multiple texts that are more or less aligned with "reality", shades of us all in "real life" playing mediated roles, not just on/off, reality vs self referentiality/walking through the fourth wall. We've seem that; we've seen Woody Allen walking up to himself and Diane Keaton in the cinema queue in Annie Hall , seen, more recently, Robt Downey Jr talking to the audience in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, seen it back in the 70s in Howard the Duck. This is something cleverer - I think.
The first 20-30 mins of the film are spent actually filming the novel, sort of. We get graphic depictions, very funny, very baroque, very pseudo-Draughtsman Contract/arch but still essentially naturalistic of the parts of the novel that are leading up to Tristram Shandy's birth.
The rest of the film ptretty much shows us the cast FILMING these parts. (We get a bit more of the novel, but hardly so's you'd notice.) And in these parts, everyone is off camera, free of being actors, but still acting out varying roles. We see Steve Coogan as Coogan-the-star, as loving father and partner, as philanderer, as pleasant star pressing the flesh, as inadequate star being a bastard-cum-schmuck, as deceitful star giving an interview to a journalist he hates. And interestingly, we see Rob Bryden, who at first seems like an unmediatedly, naturalistically, pleasant person (is that really him? how do we know he's any nicer than Steve Coogan, in real life, really?) but who also, throughout the film, imitates Steve-Coogan-as-Alan_Partridge (better than Steve Coogan himself can do it). Significantly, the fade out is Rob and Steve bickering over who can do the better Robert de Niro impression. (Rob, or so it seems..)
Winterbotton is clearly obsessed with filming what seems to be real. His last effort Nine Songs involved filming "real" penetrative sex ("played" by 2 unknown actors) intermixed with "real" rock gigs. The effect of pure realism failed to convince : the film was flat and pointless and no one liked it. The film before that, 24 Hour Party People was also self referential/postmodern and also about real people - the founders of Factory Records, New Order et al - and also starred Steve Coogan, but was much funnier than A Cock and Bull Story - which latter film significantly at one point suggests that it's enough reason to make a film , if it's really really funny, and nothing more.
This film to me teases the audience with not knowing what is real and what is mediated/fiction. Is Coogan really a philandering bastard? Did he really have kinky sex with a girl when he shouldn't have? (Yes, says treacherous memory.)Is he really a reformed father and husband in REAL LIFE? Is Bryden really nicer than him or just a better actor or just the actor who got the part of the nice person? Is this a film of Tristram Shandy at all (because who has read the book and actually knows)? Even the music, stolen from The Draughtsman's Contract, recalls Peter Greenaway's fake 18th century world of uber-ridiculous wigs and cleavages.
Or alternately - maybe it's all just a cock and bull story? A shaggy bull story?
Hmm!
I think he's (Michael Winterbotton, the director) trying to demonstrate that naturalism/narrativism vs postmodernism isn't an on-off, digital, 1 or 0 , choice. That postmodernism, and uber-reality film, are both about recognising that there are shades of reality, multiple texts that are more or less aligned with "reality", shades of us all in "real life" playing mediated roles, not just on/off, reality vs self referentiality/walking through the fourth wall. We've seem that; we've seen Woody Allen walking up to himself and Diane Keaton in the cinema queue in Annie Hall , seen, more recently, Robt Downey Jr talking to the audience in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, seen it back in the 70s in Howard the Duck. This is something cleverer - I think.
The first 20-30 mins of the film are spent actually filming the novel, sort of. We get graphic depictions, very funny, very baroque, very pseudo-Draughtsman Contract/arch but still essentially naturalistic of the parts of the novel that are leading up to Tristram Shandy's birth.
The rest of the film ptretty much shows us the cast FILMING these parts. (We get a bit more of the novel, but hardly so's you'd notice.) And in these parts, everyone is off camera, free of being actors, but still acting out varying roles. We see Steve Coogan as Coogan-the-star, as loving father and partner, as philanderer, as pleasant star pressing the flesh, as inadequate star being a bastard-cum-schmuck, as deceitful star giving an interview to a journalist he hates. And interestingly, we see Rob Bryden, who at first seems like an unmediatedly, naturalistically, pleasant person (is that really him? how do we know he's any nicer than Steve Coogan, in real life, really?) but who also, throughout the film, imitates Steve-Coogan-as-Alan_Partridge (better than Steve Coogan himself can do it). Significantly, the fade out is Rob and Steve bickering over who can do the better Robert de Niro impression. (Rob, or so it seems..)
Winterbotton is clearly obsessed with filming what seems to be real. His last effort Nine Songs involved filming "real" penetrative sex ("played" by 2 unknown actors) intermixed with "real" rock gigs. The effect of pure realism failed to convince : the film was flat and pointless and no one liked it. The film before that, 24 Hour Party People was also self referential/postmodern and also about real people - the founders of Factory Records, New Order et al - and also starred Steve Coogan, but was much funnier than A Cock and Bull Story - which latter film significantly at one point suggests that it's enough reason to make a film , if it's really really funny, and nothing more.
This film to me teases the audience with not knowing what is real and what is mediated/fiction. Is Coogan really a philandering bastard? Did he really have kinky sex with a girl when he shouldn't have? (Yes, says treacherous memory.)Is he really a reformed father and husband in REAL LIFE? Is Bryden really nicer than him or just a better actor or just the actor who got the part of the nice person? Is this a film of Tristram Shandy at all (because who has read the book and actually knows)? Even the music, stolen from The Draughtsman's Contract, recalls Peter Greenaway's fake 18th century world of uber-ridiculous wigs and cleavages.
Or alternately - maybe it's all just a cock and bull story? A shaggy bull story?
Hmm!
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no subject
Date: 2006-01-31 02:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-31 07:46 am (UTC)Dave Langford, if memory serves, but I'm probably wrong. I listened to most of the recent BBC R4 serial adaptation, and I can't say I was impressed enough to seek out the source material.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-31 05:21 pm (UTC)I'm so jealous that you've already seen the movie! It opened in NYC and LA last week, but I don't know when it'll get to Seattle. Definitely the new film I'm most interested in seeing at the moment.
You've actually missed two Winterbottom films between 24 Hour Party People and 9 Songs. In This World is a semi-documentary, or perhaps neo-realist, film about two Afghani refugees trying to get from Pakistan to the UK. Code 46 is a brilliant and disturbing SF dystopia/romance starring Samantha Morton and Tim Robbins, about a Seattle insurance investigator who travels to China to look into a case of forged documents. I highly recommend it. It's probably my favorite SF movie of the past five years.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-31 05:50 pm (UTC)The chestnuts scene is in the film!
no subject
Date: 2006-01-31 09:23 pm (UTC)first twenty or five-and-twenty seconds--and did no more than gently
solicit Phutatorius's attention towards the part:--But the heat gradually
increasing, and in a few seconds more getting beyond the point of all sober
pleasure, and then advancing with all speed into the regions of pain, the
soul of Phutatorius, together with all his ideas, his thoughts, his
attention, his imagination, judgment, resolution, deliberation,
ratiocination, memory, fancy, with ten battalions of animal spirits, all
tumultuously crowded down, through different defiles and circuits, to the
place of danger, leaving all his upper regions, as you may imagine, as
empty as my purse."
no subject
Date: 2006-02-04 10:10 pm (UTC)