A Cock and Bull Story (2005)

 "Poke your little pecker out the window..."

I've actually read (and indeed blogged) The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, which on balance added to my enjoyment of this very funny film. And yet one might just as well see this as a precursor to The Trip, and the partnership of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon.

Of course, the whole thing is quite postmodern, alternating scenres of Tristram Shandy, that famiusly unfilmable novel, with a behind the scenes narrative where Brydon and, especially, Coogan, play versions of themselves, rather effectively.

The joke throughout, of course, is that Coogan himself hasn't read the novel, and everyone else has. Through all the buddy buddy stuff with Coogan, the jokes about his sexual difficulties following the birth of the baby and his habits of infidelity nonetheless, it's really all about the fourth wall.

Stephen Fry's academic cameo puts it best: the novel probably shouldn't be seen as postmodern, an anachronistic term. There's nothing modern about textual self-referentialism- see Rabelais and Cervantes- but it becomes rather less fasionable after Lawrence Sterne. By 2005, it's back, and can be commingled with actual postmodernism. Hence this film, and its almost obvious playfulness with the fourth wall, where Coogan's sexual wakwardness echoes Walter Shandy's. Yet Coogan's life is like the Shany of the novel; too complex, real and nuanced to accurately be summed up by any narrative or work of art.

This film isn't as deep as I've made it sound. But it's funny.