Tristram Shandy: A Cock And Bull Story

Rivals Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan include everyone in on the jokes.

Herald rating: * * * * *

The prolific and versatile British director Michael Winterbottom can burn with quiet rage (as In This World did for refugees and The Road to Guantanamo for the political prisoners of the US); he can lovingly depict lonely working-class lives (the wonderful Wonderland); and he can cook up dry, sly, straight-faced commentaries on celebrity and entertainment as he did in 24 Hour Party People.

His new film, his most straightforwardly enjoyable yet, defies categorisation.

It purports to be an adaptation of Laurence Sterne's famous 18th-century novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.

That curiosity of English literature was, as one character puts it, "a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post about". Its narrative style was described by the author as "progressive digressions" - the narrator doesn't reach the point of his own birth until halfway through - and its typographical quirks, which inserted relevant legal documents and even included a black page, were unheard of.

It never attracted a film-maker's attention because it must have seemed about as screen-friendly as Shakespeare's sonnets, say, or the tide-charts.

And Winterbottom has not set out to adapt the novel to the screen - indeed the film is a process of conscientiously avoiding doing any such thing. What he has done is to mimic Sterne's distracted whimsy and, in the process, created a very funny film about the process (or perhaps the impossibility) of making a film.

If that sounds arch and too clever by half, it avoids both faults by being gently but relentlessly self-mocking.

Neither is it high-brow and knowing. A handful of very English references apart, everybody's included on every joke and though it rattles along no one gets left behind.

Movies about making movies are nothing new (think everything from Truffaut's Day For Night and Fellini's 8 to Mamet's State and Main and Spike Jonze's Adaptation).

What sets this apart from the pack is its semi-improvised script, its peculiarly English restraint and its fine sense of the absurd.

Coogan, whose aptitude for satirising himself enlivened the best sequence in Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes, is notionally the star of both films here, playing Shandy, Shandy's father and Steve Coogan, who is playing ... you get the idea.

But he is given a great run for his money by co-star Brydon, who nearly steals the show, as the pair maintain an undeclared rivalry (a great running gag concerns their relative heights).

To list even half a dozen of the film's events would be as pointless as trying to explain what the original novel is "about".

If you ever enjoyed an English comedy show on the telly and you're ready for a laugh, you're going to love this. Don't worry if you haven't the faintest idea what it's about. No one else does either.

Cast: Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Shirley Henderson, Jeremy Northam, Naomie Harris, Kelly Macdonald, Gillian Anderson
Director: Michael Winterbottom
Running time: 94 minutes
Rating: M, offensive language, sexual references
Screening: Rialto
Verdict: Vigorous, fast-moving and hugely entertaining comedy which is a sly commentary on celebrity and the process of film-making.