TRISTRAM SHANDY: A COCK AND BULL STORY

Director: Michael Winterbottom
Cast: Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Gillian Anderson, Jeremy Northam, Naomie Harris, Kelly Macdonald, Stephen Fry
Runtime: 91 minutes
Country: United Kingdom
Rating: 14A (Sexually suggestive scenes, coarse language, nudity)

"Because their work is so varied, the director Winterbottom and Boyce, his frequent writer, are only now coming into focus as perhaps the most creative team in British film." - Chicago Sun-Times

A Special Presentation at the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival®, TRISTRAM SHANDY: A COCK AND BULL STORY is a breezy, witty and widely acclaimed love poem to cinema.

Director Michael Winterbottom (24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE, WONDERLAND) approaches Laurence Sterne’s unruly book “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman” by crafting a film about the making of a film adaptation of the novel. In the process, he remains remarkably true to the spirit of Sterne’s energetic and inventive comic creation. Moving from the powdered wigs and battle scenes that comprise the filmed world of the novel to the efforts of the production staff struggling to make the film, Winterbottom lets the two realities play off each other to great effect.

Steve Coogan (24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE, HAPPY ENDINGS), plays Shandy, the hero of the novel, as well as himself playing Shandy. While Shandy struggles with watching the torturous and humorous antics that accompany his birth, Coogan struggles to balance competing forces in his life: a girlfriend who has come four hundred miles with their newborn baby to see him, an agent trying to cover up a potential scandal, an attractive assistant director and a coterie of selfish hangers-on.

Soon, the boundaries between past and present, fiction and reality become blurred. Is Coogan Shandy? Or is Shandy Coogan? Winterbottom’s cast, bravely led by Coogan, also features finely understated performances from Rob Brydon and Gillian Anderson, among others. All revel in the collision of present escapades and novelistic fantasies.

"More fun than a company picnic - and a lot more fun than the classic 18th century novel that inspired it - Michael Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story is the first good comedy of 2006." - New York Daily News