Cos­mos

Some­one has gone to the trou­ble of cre­at­ing a lit­tle noose out of string and hang­ing a spar­row from a branch by its neck. Hap­pen­ing across this macabre sculp­ture, jit­tery lothario Witold (Jonathan Genet) and his fash­ion design­er pal Fuchs (Johan Libéreau) decide to ded­i­cate some of their spare time to cul­ti­vat­ing an investigation.

They take a room in a fam­i­ly-run guest house, enter­ing into a lop-sided bub­ble of sur­re­al squab­bles, exper­i­men­tal seafood sup­pers and erot­i­cal­ly ingest­ed cig­a­rettes. Pol­ish direc­tor Andrzej Zulaws­ki died short­ly after the pre­mière of Cos­mos at the 2015 Locarno Film Fes­ti­val, but he has left us with a gid­dy mas­ter­work whose every frame pos­i­tive­ly heaves with stim­u­lat­ing ideas and inci­dent. Adapt­ed from the absur­dist 1965 nov­el by fel­low Pole Witold Gom­brow­icz, it’s a sto­ry pro­pelled less by log­ic than by its will­ing­ness to con­nect togeth­er sym­bols and clues in a rabid search for its own meaning.

Once the tone set­tles after the first few min­utes, each scene is charged with hair-trig­ger sus­pense, as Zulaws­ki promis­es us that noth­ing and no-one will head in the direc­tion we expect. What’s being said even­tu­al­ly seems less impor­tant than how it’s being said, at what vol­ume, to whom (if any­one), and who is speak­ing (often every­one). It’s a cin­e­mat­ic sym­pho­ny which jack­knifes on a dime from the insane to the intro­spec­tive. Witold clam­ours to under­stand what’s hap­pen­ing, but his ques­tions just lead to more ques­tions. He realis­es that he must focus on what’s impor­tant, and chalk up the tor­rent of enig­mas as eccen­tric back­ground noise.

Not by any means for the faint of heart, Cos­mos is nonethe­less a jud­der­ing cloud­burst of pure visu­al and aur­al ener­gy, a rare instance of deep intel­lec­tu­al enquiry buoyed by unex­pect­ed jolts of puls­ing emo­tion. Every­one involved under­stands that they don’t need to under­stand – it makes Zulawski’s pre­cise orches­tra­tion of the cracked action appear all the more remark­able. A swan­song of scary, screw­ball eminence.