Cosmos

He was born in Ukraine and spent his early life in Poland, barely escaping death at the hands of Nazis. Knowing firsthand what depths we can sink to, he dedicated himself to mixing high and low with ululating abandon. If his politics and blocking seem to evoke a railroad being constructed in front of an already moving train, it was ultimately an honest concentration of fears and exuberances born of the realization that his life was not a guarantee. And so Żuławski shouted everything on his mind, threw sex and violence at the screen with equal parts glee and revulsion, and rarely hid behind an edit. He wanted the camera to run every step and keep pace with his characters. When he does edit to move significantly through time or space, it's to shock you, as in his favourite rug­-pulling technique, dropping the score out of a scene without warning. Ugliness must be paid attention to, even celebrated, as it gallops into and trots upon our lives. Sometimes it's all we have, and we must have something. As one of the fatuous aristocrats in his 1991 film "The Blue Note" says: "What is beautiful does not last." Trauma lasts forever.

"Cosmos" is both typical and atypical Żuławski. It's laugh-out-loud funny right up to its final seconds, new territory for the haunted auteur. The cast has delicious comedic chemistry and the movie ends with the funniest closing text I've ever read followed by a gag reel. In Azéma's Madame Woytis we have the ever­present overbearing mother figure (familiar from his films "L'Amour Braque," "The Blue Note," "La Femme Publique" and "Szamanka") who seems to enjoy tormenting her offspring, though this time with more demented personality thanks to the mop­topped queen of French cinema's fervor. It's sex-obsessed but it's romantic in its perverted longing, instead of just desperate. Witold has a poetic conception of the woman for whom he pines, and one gets the sense that he fears an Icarus­type immolation should he ever get too close. When he first shakes Lena's hand, it looks like he's suddenly begun masturbating in front of her thanks to camera placement and his cowed, fidgeting body language. He can't ever act as though he's meant to have a place among his fellow homo­sapiens, but that doesn't keep him from throwing himself into crowds of them. That's the paradox at the heart of Żuławski's cinema. Those who do understand the bottomless grotesquery of humanity are addicted to the good parts that lay beyond. 

Witold is plainly driven mad every second he remains in the company of Lena and her familiars, but he can't break away. He wants her, or the idea of her, badly enough to let himself be mentally hobbled by the impossibility of their union. His paranoia at the events transpiring all around the house grows and grows and soon comes to hallucinatory life. A look at a Tintin comic in the inn manifests into a man dressed as the famous boy detective during the final act. Long conversations about fixing Catherette's lip precede the introduction of a woman played by the same actress whose perfect mouth conceals deep emotional scars. A final destructive act may be something Witold dreams, compells or performs. Lena herself, who seems so detached and vibrant when Witold first encounters her, sinks into his quivering uncertainty the more time she spends at the receiving end of his affections. She undergoes transformation while Witold lusts after her essence and writes soul describing passages about her in his book. The women in earlier work by the Polish conjurer tended to blend together, thanks in part to his continuous casting of lover/muse Sophie Marceau and because he relied so heavily on doppelgängers as narrative devices. But here the women are much more clearly delineated. Guerra (last seen in "Lines of Wellington," Raúl Ruiz's first film after his death) is the most memorable because she slowly becomes Witold and, by extension, Żuławski himself, prone to unexpected mood swings and bouts of open mouthed quaking at the unruly design of fate. What does Lena see when she stands shivering, cigarette stuck aloft, staring into the sky? Us, sitting there, watching her. The same mad bunch of contradictory insects that Żuławski saw whenever he pointed his camera at anyone: the boundless, endless possibility of it all, the horror and the wonder. The joy of wordplay, the ache of love, the terror of fascism, the pangs of envy. He saw all of us, everything we wanted to hide, and his cinema is an explosion of all those dirty, secret things. "Cosmos" is everything at once too fast, like the broken merry-go-round, sudden inebriation, or a magic trick. Real life is only steps away, but you'll never find anything as brutally fantastic out there.