Cosmos (2015) Żuławski ransacks his knowledge of art and pop culture for the most surreal swansong (Review)

It’s a strange world, but has it ever looked stranger than it does through the eyes of Witold Gombrowicz and Andrzej Żuławski?  Żuławski was the late Polish director whose film Possession became quite the artiest thing on the Department of Public Prosecutions’ infamous ‘video nasties’ list.  Gombrowicz was one of a generation of European authors who mixed their love of crime fiction with their academic smarts to create detective fiction with deep philosophical undercurrents about storytelling, self-knowledge and the way we perceive reality.  His work could be compared to Umberto Eco, or Alain Robbe-Grillet, the novelist and director who collaborated on the classic Last Year at Marienbad with Alain Resnais, whose actress wife Sabine Azéma stars in Żuławski’s final film Cosmos, adapted from the novel by Gombrowicz…

That’s a rather convoluted link, but convoluted links are what Cosmos – released by Arrow Academy on Blu-Ray and DVD – is all about.  Its mismatched pair of heroes, played by Jonathan Genet and Johan Libéreau, are firmly convinced that they’re on the brink of uncovering some kind of unimaginable occult criminal conspiracy.  The viewer, meanwhile, is painfully aware that they’re hilariously deluded.  There is no secret behind the mysterious events of Cosmos any more than there is a secret code in the stars.  In attempting to uncover this nonexistent secret, Genet’s character will cross the line between detective and perpetrator.

Genet’s character is named Witold, named, he tells Libéreau’s Fuchs, after an author his mother liked who was good at setting up mysteries but could never write endings.  The joke is that Gombrowicz’s endings were deliberately unsatisfying as a reflection of the chaos he saw in the universe around him, and the story can be read as a struggle between Witold the character and Witold the author.  The former wants everything to be part of a neat pattern, the latter doesn’t believe such a system can exist.  The philosophical dialogue is complicated by the addition of a third voice, Żuławski’s.  Żuławski sympathises with Gombrowicz’s philosophy but understands the seductive power of discovering a conspiracy, and his film mediates between the two Witolds’ world views as a result.

In an interview on the Arrow disc, Gombrowicz’s widow Rita talks of the difference in temperament between Żuławski’s Cosmos and her husband’s novel.  In place of Gombrowicz’s dry, amused tone, Żuławski substitutes his own manic excess.  Saying that, Cosmos is more faithful to its literary source than some of Żuławski’s other adaptations.  1985’s L’Amour braque, for example, concerns a bank robber trying to win back his moll from two brothers only to see her fall in love with a hanger-on he can’t shake off; it is somehow an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot.  Cosmos never goes that far, but it removes a fair bit of Witold and Fuchs’ back story, making their motivations even more mysterious, and Żuławski delights in having his actors give mannered, bizarre line readings.  In one early scene, Genet delivers one of Witold’s lines in the voice of Donald Duck for no immediately obvious reason.  His is one of the film’s more low-key performances.

In the middle of all this lunacy, Żuławski’s camera operates with unusual restraint.  André Szankowski’s cinematography uses natural light, with gentle dollies in and out being the most common form of movement.  Part of why Żuławski is doing this is simply to lull the viewers into a false sense of security; the way-out final act ends with a sequence of avant-garde formalism that may lead some viewers to believe their disc is faulty.  The calmer sequences also serve to draw the viewer further into Witold’s way of thinking.  When he first sees Catherette, the maid whose facial disfigurement comes to obsess him, Żuławski refuses to give her a close-up.  The crucial deformity is a tiny element of a bigger picture; if you see it, you see it.  Before long, viewers will be scrutinising every scene as closely as Witold.

Examining everything this closely means you run the risk of missing the wood for the trees, and Witold certainly manages that.  In the movie’s most outrageous gag, he spends so long ruminating over a damp patch that he thinks resembles an arrow that he fails to notice the much larger damp patch above it shaped exactly like a vulva.  His blindness to the feminine here might be used as part of a queer reading of the film; his fixation on the beautiful, remote Lena might just be another part of his tormented detective-poet self-image.  He only seems to relax around Fuchs, and the chemistry between the two men keeps the film enjoyable even at its most abstruse.  Despite his anomalous love of Pasolini, Fuchs is the cheerful philistine to Witold’s pretentious aesthete, at one point misinterpreting Witold’s namedrop of Robert Bresson as a reference to Luc Besson.  Yet they still spend all their time with each other, like a very odd married couple.

If you laughed at that Bresson-Besson gag, you’re probably the kind of viewer Żuławski is after.  Cosmos’s frame of reference is dizzying in its breadth, zapping through Sartre, Stendhal, Chaplin and Schoenberg as well as Żuławski’s own filmography.  It also has a lengthy, charming digression on the magic of Tintin.  Just as Gombrowicz’s novel dressed its philosophy in the trenchcoat of pulp literature, Żuławski’s film ransacks the director’s knowledge of art and pop culture, always making sure cinema is at the core of it.  Perhaps no younger director would dare give film such an exalted position.  But then, as Cosmos reminds us, Żuławski wasn’t like anybody else, and the chance to take a last visit to his world is not to be refused.  The film demands so much analysis I’ve only had the space to briefly mention the extras, but they are thorough and satisfying, matching the care Arrow took when reissuing the work of that other maverick Pole Walerian Borowczyk.

Thanks for reading our review of Cosmos

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