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“Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story,” (U.K.-Picturehouse) by the once-serious Michael (“Jude”) Winterbottom is meant, I suppose, to be another audacious picture from the director whose previous work–the sexually explicit, “Nine Songs”–brought a new dimension to the raunchy, rock-concert flick.

“Shandy” is based, in part, on the famed, 18th century comic novel by Laurence Sterne, which is a minefield of comic interjections and digressions, not to mention its skewed chronology. “Shandy” intercuts portions of the 18th century novel with the behavior of the picture’s leads ‘Carrying On’ off-screen, in and out of costume, to create an old-and-new dichotomy.

I think the intent is to kid the breeches off the endless, British, Masterpiece Theatre series and to create another “Tom Jones”–Tony Richardson’s 18th century bawdy comedy from Fielding’s classic 18th century comic novel. “Tom Jones” took the 1963 Oscar for Best Picture, a rarity for British films, and led to Richardson’s subsequent career of ambitious flops made trying to top or equal his early hit.

The whole 18th-century vocabulary of wigs, carriages, and push-up bosoms has grown tiresome to me. Not so the film’s in-joke about the impoverished Anglo film industry having to import an American name (Gillian Anderson) to get the requisite budget to film “Shandy’s” big battle scene. Of course, Anderson is best known for her U.S. TV series, “The X-Files”–as the film’s Brit stars, Coogan and Brydon, are well known TV personalities in the U.K.

As if to prove the novel is insoluble, this “Cock and Bull Story” tends to tire us with a plethora of phallic jokes and the repeated japes of a group of war veterans, in period costume, fighting old battlefield conflicts as board games. Repeatedly, it falls back on the competing actors’ upsmanship and Coogan’s infidelity with a pretty production aide.

“Tristram Shandy” begins with Coogan and Bryden in the movie’s make-up tent. Coogan is in the chair, being pancaked and powdered to play the titular Shandy (he also plays Shandy pere ), and he trades barbs with the less prepossessing-looking character actor, Brydon, who plays the subordinate role of Uncle Toby Shandy. Brydon is unhappy about their inequalities of pay, casting, and perks. They blather on about teeth whitening, haircuts, and what constitutes a supporting rather than starring role–all the while creating true comedic joy.

As we later learned at the press conference, the makeup tent scene– arguably the most memorable in the film–was completely ad-libbed by these funny men during a rain delay.

Fortunately, before it completely degenerates into “Carry On” shenanigans, “Tristram Shandy” almost inadvertently stumbles onto the discovery of a droll and cheeky British comic team capable of rivaling Hope and Crosby and rejuvenating the English film industry.

Steve Coogan plays the suave, supercilious superior (of the same name) to the over-anxious, fawning and competitive one played by the same-named Rob Brydon. From the moment you see these two blokes needling each other, you sense they were made for each other. As Balanchine once told Jerome Robbins of his delectable ballet to Chopin piano pieces, “Dances at a Gathering”: “Make more!”

The inside poop, from the program notes, is that Coogan has starred in two hit British television shows, in only one of which, “I’m Alan Partridge,” Brydon occasionally appeared in support. Both comics were featured in Michael Winterbottom’s previous picture, “24 Hour Party People,” about the rise and fall of a record company, with Coogan starring. And Coogan is such a force in English TV that he has executive-produced two series starring Rob Brydon.

In “Tristram,” the actor named Steve (played by Steve Coogan) has a blonde companion, Jennie, with whom he has sired an infant. On location, however, he is shagging another Jennie, a dumbbell of a production aide (Naomie Harris). The assistive, black Jennie shows off her cinema expertise by name-dropping pretentious bilge about her favorite scenes from Fassbinder, Bresson, and Fellini. This running gag along with the extramarital shenanigans might well have been trimmed. (According to the “Tristram” press kit, Coogan, “after being hailed by the press as a genius,” was, subsequently, “pulled apart by the tabloids for his scandalous private life.”)

I am unsure of Mr. Winterbottom’s often lame sense of humor, which is, obviously, more Brit than mine. For all of its’ pleasures, “Tristram Shandy” might have done better to ape “Tom Jones” as a completely 18th-Century picaresque and less of a commentary on the dreary and impoverished present state of the British cinema. We know all about that.

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“Cache/Hidden” (France-Sony Pictures Classics), was, deservedly, the Festival’s Closing Night Feature. This fascinating, political thriller was written and directed by the ever-provocative Michael (“The Piano Teacher”) Haneke, the fiendish 63-year-old Austrian who now lives and works in Paris.

The marvelous perplexity of “Cache” earned Haneke the Best Director award at the 2005 Cannes Festival. It created a lot of buzz by opening up an old French political wound–the 1961 retaliatory drowning of 200 Algerians in the Seine at the height of the Algerian crisis.

Georges and Anne (French stars Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche) live in a modish, book-filled Paris apartment with their 12-year-old son, Pierrot. They are both involved in publishing–he as host of a book-chat TV show and she as a busy editor at a publishing house.

The couple finds it understandably distressing when they keep receiving videos of their Paris dwelling; of the farmhouse of Georges’ ancient mother (the great old-time star Annie Girardot); and of childish drawings of figures spouting blood.
Georges mistakes the culprit as Majid, the now middle-aged Algerian who, as a boy, had been adopted by Georges’ parents after his own folks had been drowned in the Seine atrocity when he was just six. Georges had falsely maligned Majid when they were both boys. (Majid, it seems, got too much of the parental affection which Georges craved for himself.) After he was blamed for crimes that young Georges had actually committed, Majid was exiled to an orphanage.

Mature Georges tracks down the now middle-aged Majid (Maurice Benichou) and his son, but neither proves to be the culprit, and so this acrid film turns into an unsettling conundrum. By unjustly accusing Majid once more, Georges has committed a second and irreversible racist injustice. Majid’s ultimate response to this false accusation is a shocker.

The film ends with two enigmatic long shots:
1) Of the old farmhouse, following a mourners’ procession (after Georges’ mother’s funeral, I assume), with Georges’ son, Pierrot pulling free of his parents and running off.
2) Of Pierrot’s lycee, at the afternoon break, with the active comings and goings of children and their elders.

Months after the October 7 critics’ screening of “Cache,” opinion makers continue to argue about the film’s last shot. Does the final surveillance camera view of the front of a school contain portentous information? Or does it simply parallel the opening, fixed-camera cityscape, which, in turn, becomes a video of the exterior of a rich, media couple’s upscale Paris townhouse, which makes only its dwellers fearful of their secret observer?

Manohla Dargis of The Times found the clue to this seemingly neutral shot in the lower left hand corner of the frame, which she claims “will have you and your friends deep in argument for days afterward.” Having been forewarned by her review, I kept watching that corner of the screen, but, as usual, Monohla saw more than meets my eye. I did see the roof of a possibly suspicious black car in the foreground (lower, center), but there is nothing to report in the lower left, this foretop-man cries. (Haneke must spell things out more fully for boobs like me.)

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On the last day of the critics’ screenings, October 7, the 12:30 p.m. scheduling of the final film, “Cache,” enabled me to attend a 10 a.m. showing of “Brokeback Mountain,” which had already won the Golden Lion of Venice and was the sensation of the Toronto Film Festival. Inexplicably, “Brokeback” was rejected by both the Cannes Festival and the New York Festival selection committees.

After the screening, as I emerged from my stall at Metro’s “Lion’s Den,” I congratulated the director Ang Lee, who was waiting on line. I asked if he knew why he had been excluded from the New York Film Festival this year, since he had been a regular in past seasons (“The Ice Storm” and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”). After all, I contended, his film was “a masterpiece” and, as such, the equal or superior to any film in the NYFF. The very correct Mr. Lee replied, “I can’t be of any help to you.”

I appreciate that “Brokeback” lost Best Picture to the rotten “Crash” at the Oscars, and I know that there are those who fault the film’s pacing and the scenes of domestic frustration appended by the screenwriters to the marvelously moving original short story. Yet the film won every critics circle award in all the major cities. That unanimity faults the selection of Neil Jordan’s uneven misadventures of a transvestite, “Breakfast on Pluto,” as the Festival’s Centerpiece. This choice seems curiously wrongheaded in any gay-themed cinema sweepstakes: “Pluto” left me dry-eyed; “Brokeback” brought me to tears.

(Edited by Karl Johnson and David Kaufman)

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