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FESTIVALS Spain

"Tristam Shandy" with a taste of Winterbottom

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Michael Winterbottom's previous film, 9 Songs, showed us a couple having sex and attending rock performances. The controversial film was not a plot-driven project, consolidating Winterbottom's reputation as a filmmaker willing to go against formulaic scripts and categorisations. His new film, A Cock and Bull Story, in competition for the Golden Shell in San Sebastian, reinforces the director's fascination for projects with no predefined structures.

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Freely adapted from the 18th century novel by Laurence Sterne The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman, broadly considered to be as unfilmable, A Cock and Bull Story starts with a backstage chat between Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon arguing about the importance of each others roles in the film. Then, after the credits, the flirt with real life seems to be gone and the film dives into an 18th century set to tell us the chaotic events preceding the narrator's birth. Audacious, Martin Hardy's script is at this point a witty exercise in style combining flashback and flash-forward scenes with anachronistic elements. The link between Walter Shandy's domestic obligations towards his wife and 20th century Pavlov's theory on the dog's motivation is established in a bold, hilarious way. Then the birth scene is cut, the shooting is finished and the film gets a totally different style, with both the cast and crew assuming their (real?) personalities in an incestuous fake plot where the line between fiction and reality are increasingly hard to define.

Fooling the moviegoers expectations, A Cock and Bull Story becomes then a film about making a film. We see Steve Coogan's obsession with his costumes, we follow the doubts about the recreation of Namur's battle, we witness Gillian Anderson ("The one from "BayWatch"? "No that is another Anderson...") accepting the widow Wadman's role, a role which had been cut from the script's initial draft and ends up being added (but only in one of Coogan's nightmare).

Revolution Films, founded by Andrew Eaton and the director himself in 1994, produced the A Cock and Bull Story in association with Baby Cow Films. The international sales are handled by London-based company The Works.

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