Michael Winterbottom

Auteur theory holds that the best film directors effectively repeat themselves, coming back to the same themes over and over again, embellishing ideas and deepening their vision and world view.  Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese would be a prime contemporary examples.

There’s another type of quality filmmaker that doesn’t fit the pattern.  Some directors like to challenge themselves afresh with each new project, not only choosing a different story and/or genre but a substantially different style as well.

Michael Winterbottom is a case in point.  Both prolific and substantially difficult to pin down, Winterbottom’s career to date has seen the British director make everything from quality literary adaptations to quasi-documentaries to self-conscious exercises in on-screen eroticism.  A jack of all cinematic trades he can “do” political, musical and comedic, can alternate between earnest tugging at the heart-strings and satirical indifference or between damning indictments of real-life violence and boundary pushing dramatisations of the same thing.

Winterbottom doesn’t pull everything off equally well and is often too clever for his own good.  “9 Songs”, his worst feature, an attempt to fashion a narrative out of live music, shots of Antarctica and sequences in which a fictional couple endlessly copulate, is as dull as it is pretentious.  Last year’s “The Killer Inside Me”, an adaptation of Jim Thompson’s cult novel, bravely showed Jessica Alba having her pretty face caved in but left a bitter taste in the mouth, unable to reconcile the subjective psychosis of its murderous lead character with the sub-Lynchian, surreal conclusion.

I suspect the Winterbottom films that will age best are his collaborations with the comedian Steve Coogan.  Both “24 Hour Party People” and “Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story” are witty and self reflexive, the first the story of the Manchester music scene from the late 1970s until the mid 1990s, the second less a version of the Lawrence Stern novel than an attempt to find a cinematic equivalent to Stern’s literary style.  Walking a fine line between indulgent in-jokes and genuine insight into the subject matter, Winterbottom and Coogan come across as sharp operators.   Even when the audience isn’t being directly addressed it is constantly challenged.

A third Winterbottom and Coogan collaboration is playing at this year’s International Film Festival.  “The Trip” looks to be the funniest yet, a series of dinner table conversations between Coogan and his “Tristam Shandy” co-star Rob Brydon.