Co-stars Steve Coogan, Gillian Anderson (yes, that Gillian Anderson) and Rob Brydon (L-R) talk Shandy with the NYFF's Philip Lopate (Photo: STV)

It just seems too easy to flog the saying one more time, but I guess cliché would not be cliché unless they offered some indelible resonance: In the prolific Michael Winterbottom?s latest film, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (screening this weekend at the New York Film Festival), actor Steve Coogan describes Laurence Sterne?s 1767 source novel as ?postmodern before there was any ?modern? to be 'post' about.?

The observation raises an important point, however, because cliché canard or otherwise, at least it provides viewers the comfort of classification?some safe means of reference that will likely accompany everything ever written about both the book and the film for at least another two-and-a-half centuries, or until the world ends, whichever comes first. Sterne's own stylistic ambitions remain anyone's guess today, but now that Coogan and Winterbottom have gotten a hold of them, Tristram Shandy belongs to more than an era, genre or style. They confirm it as a genuine mindfuck?a wildly imaginative and funny sprint through one man?s psychic legacy, boasting wraiths and strata in which even Charlie Kaufman would starve to death trying to escape.

Of course, in the sprawl of probably a dozen generations, the viewer gets three men, occasionally in the same frame: Tristram, his father Walter and Coogan, the latter of whom battles irrelevancy and failure even as he is the star of the movie-within-a-movie that Winterbottom has put together. And if it feels messy?if it feels loose and disconnected and incongruous even as you know this is basically a story about families?do not adjust your set: Not even the actors could get their heads entirely around the ideas at hand.

"That was something that Michael was aware of, and he wanted to have it," Coogan told the press gathered following Thursday's screening at the Walter Reade Theater. "I play three characters, and I wanted to distinguish them as an actor and make them very markedly different. And Michael actually said to me, 'No.' He didn't want that. He wanted to blur them all so there was a very gradual change between those three characters. He didn't want the disparate parts of the film to be too disparate. He wanted there to be sort of an empathy between the characters so that what was happening now reflected the themes from within the novel, as it were. Even in a kind of subliminal way, he wanted it to be there."

Yet there is nothing remotely subliminal about the parallels intersecting Sterne's and Winterbottom's works. In fact, for a book so digressive, abstract and thought for so long to be unfilmable, Shandy shares its most potent themes?ambivalent fatherhood, class conflict, petty ambition?with two of this year's more direct (and acclaimed) festival offerings, The Squid and the Whale and L' Enfant. Coincidence? Maybe, but do not think for a minute that Tristram Shandy is some feral animal Winterbottom had the good fortune to corral. The book is anything but unfilmable?rather, it is the other 99.9 percent of the directing populace that could not see the forest for the trees.

But hey, you tell me. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story screens tonight at 6 p.m. and Saturday at noon at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall. Winterbottom will also be in town Saturday afternoon to participate in an HBO Directors Dialogue, but get your questions in early; The Reeler gives the filmmaker three minutes before he must answer for 9 Songs.