This Shandy is no small beer

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
Toronto Film Festival

Michael Winterbottom's reportedly troubled movie of Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story turns out to be pretty much of a triumph: an ingenious adaptation of Laurence Sterne's novel (thought by many to be unfilmable) and a hilarious comedy about the perils of film-making.

It also gives Steve Coogan a role he can really get his teeth into: that of Steve Coogan. Coogan plays both Tristram and his father, Walter, but spends most of the film being him being him, even at one stage dealing with a tabloid story about a sex romp in an LA hotel room that breaks during the film's shoot.

All of this fits perfectly with Sterne's novel, which is a book about the business of writing - or, as Coogan puts it, "a post-modern novel written before there was any modern to be post about".

So Winterbottom's film charts the attempts of director Mark (Jeremy Northam, looking quite like Winterbottom himself) to overcome the problems of making a period drama with limited means, not to mention Winterbottom's own problems making the film we are watching.

Highlights of this are the casting of Gillian Anderson as the Widow Wadham, via a very funny split-screen link-up to Los Angeles, which provoked spontaneous audience applause; and a preposterous giant womb into which Coogan is lowered upside down to recreate the moment of Tristram's birth.

Ian Hart as the cynical screenwriter, Roger Allam as Coogan's agent and (inevitably) Stephen Fry doubling as both a specialist in 18th-century literature and Parson Yorick all score strongly.

But it's Coogan's film. He spends much of his time sparring (often improvising) with fellow comic Rob Brydon, who plays Uncle Toby and whom Coogan suspects of being (a) taller than him and (b) having more lines than he does.

Although the pacing flags a little towards the end, Winterbottom generally works wonders keeping the conceit going, the laughs coming and the story progressing.

The result is a little like Tony Richardson's Tom Jones combined with a vintage Woody Allen movie - a British comedy with brains.