By Eric Larson

For the Post

Readers: Welcome. I'm working on a piece about Michael Winterbottom's (24 Hour Party People) new film, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. It begins as a Guestian mockumentary about the unmakeable making of a film version of Laurence Sterne's novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, which then places us inside the narrative film, then pulls us back out to watch the making of the narrative film again, which itself morphs into its own narrative film.

It's very clever. I think you'll like it. The review, that is.

The review will begin in a moment. While you wait, I'll tell you that in this review, I will offer my observations about Tristram Shandy. By and large, my evaluation will be positive. If we did stars, I'd give it 3.7 out of 5.9.

I'll spend a few words expressing the apprehensions I felt after the film's opening "documentary" scene, apprehensions that arise in me whenever a film screams "postmodernism." I'll then describe the first shot of that scene, in which Coogan, as Shandy, addresses the camera, quoting Groucho Marx ("People fool around with themselves all the time") — who, by my calculation, was not yet alive in the 18th century.

That, then, is how I intend to demonstrate to you that the film is PoMo. I'll write that Sterne's novel was an experiment in narrative storytelling centuries before PoMo, or, for that matter, Mo, was in vogue.

After all that, I'll discuss how tweaking time, layering narratives, self-referencing and other PoMo tricks are always risky business — in books and films. Audiences sometimes get off on the sheer novelty, but end up feeling empty (Memento). Sometimes, they feel assaulted by the bright lights and the bullying pace of the thing (Moulin Rouge). And sometimes, though rarely, it works; the head and heart hook up and we find ourselves caring about the characters (Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang).

Watching this film, I was thinking about adjectives like "vacuous" and "contemptuously clever," but by the end, I'd come around. "The postmodern note," I'll write, "which was beginning to grate on my ears, resolves itself toward the end, when the film seems to tire of its own cleverness and transitions, almost imperceptibly, into a genuine film about people prevented from doing or expressing anything meaningful to the people around them. We, the audience, are engaged."

Maybe. It wouldn't be PoMo if some questions didn't remain at the end.

I'll finish the review like this: "The film ends as it began — as a ha-ha documentary — and we are left wondering if we've been fooled into feeling something, and, if so, by whom and why. And, if we were not fooled, whether the intention all along was to make us feel something, and, if so, why we still feel this distance between ourselves and the story. Maybe, as Marx suggests, we're just fooling ourselves.