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World cinema lost one of its greatest directors earlier this year when Andrzej Zulawski passed away. The Polish film director produced many challenging and enthralling classic movies over a forty-five year career. His final film Cosmos is a surreal and mysterious fantasy that tells the tale of two young misfits who escape Paris to spend a few days away in a remote guest house.

Witold (Jonathan Genet) is a young man who has just failed his law school examinations. His friend Fuchs (Johan Libereau) has just quit a job at a trendy Parisian fashion company. Their lives are clearly in transition and a quaint family guest house seems a welcome retreat and a needed location to unwind and put their lives in perspective. On arrival the pair find a sparrow hanging from a string in a nearby forest. This imagery sparks the beginning of the surreal journey that looks at the human condition from an incongruous and offbeat perspective. Witold falls in love with one of the guests in the house, who has just married a respectable architect. This sparks Witold’s search for meaning and worth. This journey takes him to various locations, where further stark metaphors (another hanging animal, this time a cat) confuse the character along with the viewer.

Cosmos is based on the 1965 novel of the same name by the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz. His writing drew on psychology and the absurd and these themes are definitely depicted in Zulawski’s interpretation of the source material. Prepare to be perplexed, but entertained. As well as the literary influence the inspiration of other filmmakers is referenced throughout the movie. Pier Paolo Pasolini and his movie Theorem are mentioned on several occasions and a visual homage to Charlie Chaplin offers some comic relief to the movie.

Cosmos was released 15 years after Zulawski’s previous film Fidelity and was worth the wait. The bizarre intelligence and obscure story seems a fitting swan song for the director who liked to challenge audiences and leave loose ends at the end of almost every scene. Cosmos may seem quirky and weird to some, but there is no denying that it is a whimsical film that captures attention through evocative imagery and eccentric storytelling.