Critics reviews

Andrzej Zulawski's swan song achieves something rare in the cinema, even by his idiosyncratic standards: it cultivates a sense of total anything-goes unpredictability for the viewer on its tonal and narrative terms, which, in theory, is a dead zone for artists because it can enable a certain indulgent aimlessness.

The dynamism of the film, the spectacularly alert quality of Szankowski's camera, the exhilarating forward (and occasionally backward) motion of Julia Gregory's editing, the lush/syrupy music score and the bravura work by the entire cast, with Sabine Azéma's manic-to-the-point-of-paralysis Madame Woytis arguably first among equals, creates an absolutely committed relationship to the film's surroundings, characters and to the quintessential Zulawski themes it finds embedded in Gombrowicz's work.

Polish director Andrzej Zulawski's final film is frisky but very assured, extremely erotic at all times and in all ways, and so alive that it seems to shimmer with possibility.

Under the circumstances, it's impossible to regard COSMOS as anything but a testy, full-bodied testament—a masterpiece that's also necessarily a rakish rupture with contemporary experience. But what is COSMOS, beyond the superlatives? A posthumous prank? A rebuke to the living? An act of re-shuffled, shape-shifting nostalgia? ...As the narratives fractures, and doubles back, we arrive at a film that contests itself—the ultimate defense against complacency. See it before it self-destructs.

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.

The film is gorgeous, ceaselessly lively and funny, while also evincing a melancholic view of the human condition. Cosmos may be its director's most complex and moving artistic statement, though it rarely stops reminding us that it may be amounting to nothing at all: Bleurgh.

As usual [for Żuławski], it's almost too much cinema for its 103 minutes. Confined to a few locations and shaking with ecstasy, possibility and the torment of being alive, "Cosmos" is like absinthe distilled secretly in a prison cell. The world may be angry, confusing, loud and lopsided when drinking it, but when the bottle is empty all you'll want is more. Reality has never been this fun, even if it's frequently this random and hopeless. Better to take the oblong fantasy.

It makes for a fittingly offbeat and mystifying statement of purpose for a filmmaker fascinated by confrontations with the cosmic unknown. (He could have made one heck of a Lovecraft adaptation.) It might seem weird for weird's sake, and in some ways, it is; at any moment, the characters might drop to all fours to pick up peas or go off about Stendhal. Cosmos isn't asking its audience to solve a riddle, but to accept the unexplained as the state of the universe.

Farcical doings ensue, most of them engagingly funny as individual scenes. Trying to make the parts add up to a coherent whole, however, could drive a person as crazy as the characters. It's a surreal piece of mischief, equal parts breezy fun and maddening confusion.

What does it all mean? Wrong question. And it's probably absurd to even ask. Better, instead, to fully submit to Žuławski's last symphony of insanity and paranoia, which ends, cheekily enough, with a gag reel (quite the meta final statement). His movies allow you some blissful madness in a world brainwashed by sanity.

The film overflows its simple setting with a sustained eruption of actorly and directorial bombast, full of elastic facial acrobatics, furious screaming, and unchecked verbal vomit. The result at times recalls late-period Godard, only operating at double speed and with half as much consideration of its own cumulative meaning, an experiment that ranks somewhere between captivatingly off the wall and utterly exhausting.

Żuławski's film is all rhyme and poetry and the pleasure of nonsense. Not nonsense as in "meaninglessness" but nonsense as an alternative to the sensical, to the rational... The world that Żuławski's final film creates is one that is fundamentally cinematic, artistic, poetic.