Any new film from Polish nutter Andrzej Zulawski is occasion enough to leave the house, but this is the last we’ll ever hear from the disruptive filmmaker, who died in February, so—get ’em while they’re hot. Based on Witold Gombrowicz’s unfilmable 1967 novel, Cosmos begins with young Witold himself (lanky Jonathan Genet, who looks like he was extruded from a massive tube of Frenchness) making his way to a country guesthouse when he stumbles upon a ritually hanged sparrow. Sensing a mystery and ignited by paranoia, the young would-be lawyer, who really wants to be a writer, sets out to break (or invent) a code that seems to involve a garden rake, more hangings, and the oversized cleft lip of his maid, Catherette (Clémentine Pons, who turns up later in another role).

In a propulsive cascade of Dada-esque poetry, Witold narrates these investigations to both himself and his possibly gay companion Fuchs (Johan Libéreau), or as he bangs away at an unfinished novel. In reality, if that’s the right word, Witold’s monologue dances around his erotic fixation on Lena (Victória Guerra), the married daughter of periodically catatonic and permanently cuckoo innkeeper Madame Woytis (Sabine Azéma, not insignificantly the widow of Alain Resnais). With this already heady material heightened by Zulawski’s antic style—true to form, the filmmaker has his actors whirling around like bedlamites trying to learn modern dance—Cosmos might be asking how much gratuitous expression we can tolerate in a world built entirely on weekend box office. Significantly, references to Pasolini, Sartre, and Zulawski’s own filmography are set against jabs at Star Wars and a comment about “Steven Spiel-bleurgh”, made by a character—played by 70-year-old Jean-François Balmer, the most joyously out-there of the bunch—who invents his own language. I LOL’d, but it was a bitter, existentially stricken kind of LOL.

Georgia Straight, July 2017