2016 will be a very rich year if it offers even one other film as brazenly and convincingly out-there as Andrzej Żuławski‘s Cosmos, a melange of mysterious figures, strange events, bizarre gestures, and hilarious non-sequiturs fueled by restless temperament. Exhausting and widely entertaining, it constitutes a very fitting final transmission from one of the world’s most idiosyncratic directors.
Americans will be able to see Cosmos in just a handful of weeks — thus necessitating the release of a domestic trailer. I really do think it’s best to enter this one essentially blind, but this quick, mostly context-derived collection of moments makes for an effective preview; as I said in my review, “Almost anything can only be comprehended if seen as part of a continuum; as individual moments, they’d ring meaningless or insignificant.” You know what you’re getting and nothing is given away.
See the preview below:
Synopsis:
The late Andrzej Zulawski’s final film, a literary adaptation suffused with his trademark freneticism, transforms Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz’s novel of the same name into an ominous and manic exploration of desire. Witold who has just failed the bar, and his companion Fuchs, who has recently quit his fashion job, are staying at a guesthouse run by the intermittently paralytic Madame Woytis. Upon discovering a sparrow hanged in the woods near the house, Witold’s reality mutates into a whirlwind of tension, histrionics, foreboding omens, and surrealistic logic as he becomes obsessed with Madame Woytis’s daughter Lena, newly married to Lucien.
Cosmos will open at New York City’s Metrograph on June 17 and expand from that point forward.