Fifteen years after Fidelity, Andrzej Żuławski had returned to shoot his – as it turned out – last film. In the face of the director’s unexpected death Cosmos seems to be his epitaph, an epitaph that is as uncertain as his films were. Cosmos is a story about art as an act of creating and destroying the world, about attaching meaning to various issues and about chaos that sometimes – and only temporarily – makes sense.
The director of The Devil resettles the action of Cosmos from pre-war Zakopane to a Portuguese province. A young writer, Witold (the incredible Jonathan Genet), together with his friend Fuchs (Johan Libereau), rent rooms in a pension run by the exalted Mrs. Wojtysowa (Sabine Azéma) and her husband (the great Jean-Francois Balmer). Witold meets here two women – Catherette (Clementine Pons) and Lena (Victoria Guerra), who will shortly become the object of his obsession. When he finds a sparrow hanged on a wire in the area around the pension, he starts to investigate.
By bringing the viewers into the Portuguese pension’s microcosms, Żuławski starts to play with us. The director invites us to a space where chaos dominates. Here, nothing makes sense, as the characters seem to originate from different orders and different plays. Żuławski’s visual world is full of excess – literary quotes and allusive references to the history of film and philosophy: Sartre, Pasolini, Bresson, Spielberg and even Żuławski himself, but do not form a whole. The only way to organize the chaos is art. Every now and again Witold sits behind his laptop to write a novel in which he describes his experiences. These experiences do not create a strict description of reality but the feverish relations of an artist who seeks sense in the vicissitudes of daily life.
Cosmos is about art as a form of domesticating the world, controlling one’s own demons, and overcoming fears. Witold confronts them all the time. In one of the first scenes of the film he enters a dense wood even though he fears its darkness. Several scenes later, despite the fact that he is afraid of water, he gets into the ocean with a scarf round his neck and an umbrella in hand. Such moments of transgression build the successive chapters of the novel.
‘I would never make a film about myself’ were the first words spoken by Andrzej Żuławski when he was asked by Piotr Kletowski and Piotr Marecki in a long interview conducted in 2008. However, after the artist’s death, Cosmos may be seen as his self-portrait – with the director’s passions, desires and consciousness of restrictions defined by art.
Żuławski always distinguished himself from other Polish filmmakers through his artistic courage that resulted from his consciousness of the reality of the film industry, where eccentrics are at first greatly loved but later set aside. In the aforementioned interview he stated: ‘I sensed that every film I made could be my last, that they would not let me create any more’. The intensity of his films is partially an effect of this belief. His cinema did not try to appeal to viewers by commanding their fears, the opposite in fact: Żuławski took his viewers out of their comfort zones by breaking schemes and describing the world in a way that left it hard to define the boarders of unreality.