The film based on Witold Gombrowicz’s novel comes some 15 years after Żuławski’s last film, La Fidelité (2000), starring his then-wife Sophie Marceau. The 74-year-old director is notorious for highly original and controversial cinema, mostly made in France in the 70s and 80s – auteur movies like L'important c'est d'aimer (1975), Possession (1981), La femme publique (1984), and Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours (1989). In the nineties, Żuławski returned to Poland and continued to make films. However, he hasn’t made a movie since 2000.
His newest feature, described as a metaphysical thriller noir, is based on Witold Gombrowicz’s last novel Cosmos (1965). Considered a masterpiece and the most enigmatic work in Gombrowicz’s oeuvre, Cosmos remains a challenge to interpret. Set in Poland in the 1930’s, the novel follows a quasi-detective plot, which has the narrator, a student from Warsaw on vacation in Zakopane, investigate a series of signs and symbols. This brings him ever closer to madness and destruction of the self.
But Cosmos, as Gombrowicz himself described it, is no ordinary novel – that is, it is not a novel which tells a story. The main theme of the novel is the very formation of this story, in other words, the formation of a reality, Gombrowicz wrote.
In a recent interview for Gazeta Wyborcza, Żuławski explained his vision of Cosmos as follows:
In Cosmos, through the obsessive recurrence of certain details, a parallel reality is formed, which is not entirely our own. One could say that it is a mystical reality. And it is all in the form of a crime novel. (Find the whole interview here)
Interestingly, the idea for adapting Gombrowicz’s Cosmos to film came from Paolo Branco, the producer with whom Żuławski worked on Fidelite. In a recent interview for Gazeta Wyborcza, Żuławski explained:
I admire the producers that read such books. This devilishly intelligent and madly literary text deals with matters that are everlasting – this is a backbreaking job when it comes to adaptation.
Speaking of the difficulties of adapting this philosophical novel into the language of cinema, Żuławski said:
Writing a script based on Gombrowicz is an endless struggle with this writer’s literary wilfulness. For instance, he writes that the two men go out to the garden, but then this other person disappears, he’s not there anymore. When one writes a screenplay, one has to know where this guy went.
In his script, Żuławski transported the film’s plot from Zakopane to Portugal:
The Poland of the 1930s with its shepherd's axes would have stifled the cosmos of Gombrowicz. Alfred Jarry wrote that his Ubu Roi takes place in Poland – that is, Nowhere. And I have shot my film in Portugal, that is, Nowhere – Żuławski explained.
Shooting took place in the town of Sintra, in the south of Portugal, from mid-November to late December 2014. The Franco-Portuguese co-production features an international cast with actors from France, Portugal and Switzerland, including Jonathan Genet, Sabine Azema, Jean-Francois Balmer, Johan Libereau, Victoria Guerra, Clementine Pons and Andy Gillet.
Cosmos comes two years after the publication of Kronos - the intimate and scadalizing diary of Witold Gombrowicz. However, anyone expecting another scandalous and frantically hysteric work, of the kind which made Żuławski's fame years ago, may be disappointed.