COSMOS

                         COSMOS

                 Cosmos cinema is the most like dreaming, and yet over the years, moviegoers have relinquished the virtually boundless potential of that medium in favor of rote realism: On the blank slate that is the bigscreen, whether they realize it or not, most audiences expect cause to precede effect and for logic to govern what they see. In considering both the macro (the cosmos) and the micro (a film like “Cosmos”), they seek intelligent design, but rarely find more than irrational chaos — particularly in the work of a cult director like Zulawski (known for such erotically charged psycho-sexual provocations as “Possession” and “La femme publique”).

         Grombowicz saw humor in this search, naming his leading man (failing at both the bar exam and all attempts to write a novel) Witold after himself and putting the character through all manner of agony  emotional, intellectual, ontological — during his stay at a French guest house run by Alain Resnais’s actress widow, Sabine Azema, whose hair is an electric red powder puff. Meanwhile, Zulawski seems to relate most to the caretaker’s eccentric second husband, Leon, who knows more than he lets on and babbles in a strange Latinate language all his own (“blah-blah-tum,” he says, coining a word, “the bleurgh,” that overtakes his speech).To play Witold, Zulawski casts tall, vampire-looking Jonathan Genet, contrasting the actor’s rigid, almost androgynous attitude with that of his companion, a street tough turned fashion maven named Fuchs (Johan Libereau): short, agitated and defiantly anti-intellectual. The two young men serve for their authors as other comedic duos have onstage — take the Godot-attendant Vladimir and Estragon or Tom Stoppard’s versions of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern — a source of comedic wordplay and playfully abstract contrasts.While Witold spends his hours lost in thought, Fuchs goes out each night in search of rough trade — really rough, or so goes a running background joke, as Fuchs comes back each morning with black eyes and bruises that are never addressed or explained. Witold, on the other hand, finds himself obsessed with the two younger women sharing the guest house. One is the proprietor’s newly married — and deeply melancholic — daughter, Lena (Victoria Guerra), whom he covets at the dining room table, caressing the cutlery as if it were her hand. The other is a facially disfigured maid (Clementine Pons, the actress with the double role) whose imperfection intrigues them.

               While not an especially revealing actor in terms of what his performance says about his character’s inner turmoil, Genet falls squarely in that European tradition of thesps whose look does most of the work: His gaunt face and sunken blue eyes convey both the hunger of wanting to Figure It All Out and the horror of realizing there is No Answer. Jean-Paul Sartre might have clued him in to that futility, and sure enough, “Nausea” is one of maybe a dozen works overtly cited by the characters, only a fraction of them cinematic, including Pasolini’s “Theorema” and amusingly enough, Zulawski’s own “That Most Important Thing: Love.