ENGLISH ECCENTRIC
The comic setpiece of Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story is the hero’s birth, reenacted by actor Steve Coogan, who writhes anxiously while suspended naked, upside-down, inside a giant, sweating, pink foam womb. But the movie’s most unforgettable image comes right at the beginning, as an adult Tristram addresses us (that is, the camera) in front of his family home. Photographed in luscious hues, in the gauzy light of a summer morning, the stately brick house makes an indelible backdrop, one that establishes instantly that we are in Great Britain, centuries ago, and that we are among the landed gentry.
The house (it’s Heydon Hall in Norfolk, England) was built in the late sixteenth century in typical Jacobean fashion, from red brick, with stone accents and a steep tiled roof. It’s tautly composed, absolutely symmetrical about its center bay, and richly textured, with a storm of ornament. Its front facade is dressed with so many dormers, windows, entablatures and finials that there is hardly any blank wall at all. And the ridge of its roof is capped, musically, with a string of elements that are all nearly a story high: a central cupola, two lone chimneys, and, to each side of them, runs of five identical chimneys. The house is both restrained and ridiculous, which might also be said of Tristram himself.