Cosmos (2015) was the last film that Andrzej Żuławski ever made. It’s clear from the start that Żuławski intends to bid adieu to the cinema. Cosmos is full of self-referential and intertextual dialogue that puts Żuławski into perspective as an artist both historically and aesthetically. At one point one of the main characters makes an off-handed reference to Żuławski’s first French film L’important c’est d’aimer (1975) while the ongoing banter between the two leads in Cosmos discusses and analyzes the films Teorema (1968), Madame de…(1953), and The Adventures Of Tintin (2011).
These references in Cosmos to other films suggest two things regarding Żuławski’s views on himself as a filmmaker. The first is that Żuławski clearly places his own work in the same vein as Pasolini’s politically subversive, modernist dramas. The second point that Żuławski makes is that his films and those that inspired or influenced them (Madame de… and Teorema) are hardly relevant in a cinema that prizes The Adventures Of Tintin or “Star Wars, the latest episode”. Żuławski’s point of view is that of a curmudgeon. Cosmos is, in this way, a scream into the void of popular American cinema from the fringes of the art house circuit.
As a vehicle for self-evaluation and/or self-annihilation, Żuławski couldn’t have chosen a more apt literary source than Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos. The rampant paranoia and pervasive mania in Gombrowicz’s novel suits the expressionistic visual style and fierce nihilism of Żuławski. The resulting film adaptation of the text is a delirious cavalcade of slapstick, erotica, and high energy fits of lust or rage executed with a sublime sensitivity. In making Cosmos, Żuławski re-teams with composer Andrzej Korzyński to create the same terrifying synthesis of music and image that propelled Szamanka (1995) and Possession (1981) into the darkest and most debauched depths of the human spirit.
Cosmos opens with the arrival of Witold (Jonathan Genet) and Fuchs (Johan Libéreau) at the home of Madame Woytis (Sabine Azéma) and her second husband Leon (Jean-François Balmer). Witold and Fuchs have come to the French countryside to get away from Paris in order to find peace so Witold may complete his novel. However, a series of disturbing signs and incidents send Witold spiraling into a paranoid frenzy that is only further agitated by his growing lust for the married daughter of his hosts named Lena (Victória Guerra).
Żuławski shoots the Woytis household with the same claustrophobic style as he did L’important c’est d’aimer. But Żuławski adds to this his sensitivity for the French landscapes and gardens that marked the dramatic reprieves in his films L’Amour braque (1985) and La femme publique (1984). Żuławski’s outsider perspective lends these spaces, interior and exterior, an inherent sense of wonder that imbues these tension rich images with an underlying possibility that something fantastic is about to happen. As is his fashion, Żuławski traverses all of these spaces in criss-crossing dolly shots that capture the beauty of a locale as effectively as the technique disorients the viewer.
The circumstances of the production of Cosmos informs any reading of the dramatic material. Witold’s psychic deterioration reads as Żuławski’s coming to terms with his own mortality. All of the hangings in Cosmos and Żuławski’s obligatory equation of sex with death only serves to reinforce this interpretation of the visual text. Cosmos, made after fifteen years of working only on his novels, is Żuławski’s swan song.
