Kosmos revisited

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

31 July

* Contains spoilers – do not read, if you want to watch the film for the first time *

Kosmos (2010) has passed my Does it Bear Watching Again? test (DIBWA) (or whatever I call it). If I had had a chance to watch it again at Cambridge Film Festival, it would have been to check on detail that I felt that I had missed first time around.

As it is, ten months later, it had me in tears at the end, after having been weighing in the balance whether knowing what was to happen (although getting the sequence wrong several times, not, I think, because it had been re-edited*) mattered to my appreciation for all but the last few minutes. For I was watching it through the more critical lens of scrutinizing it to see whether it worked, but the cumulative impact still hit me, even if (partly because of reading TAKE ONE’s review) I had been more aware of the way in which the soundtrack, including electronic and natural sounds, played its part.


Some things that I had remembered aright:

* Someone who reviewed the film on IMDb wrongly thought that the woman with the crutch (reminiscent of Lady Archer) kills herself, not the teacher - as if there were any doubt, the former is still around at the end

* That Neptün and Kosmos both counter gravity, and, with the paperwork that litters the place, fly around his lodging

* The role of the falling star / spacecraft in healing the boy who was not speaking

* Kosmos irritating those who think that he should conform to what living a proper life consists in, having a job and doing work


Some things I had not weighed properly:

* How Neptün is jealous of the teacher, because of her relations with Kosmos, and we are twice shown her throwing stones at the other woman's window (and that she had given herself this name, then Kosmos his own in response)

* Just how ambiguous it is whether she has sex with Kosmos at the conclusion of the scene referred to above (and / or an earlier scenes at his lodgings, where they behave like wolves)

* The coherence of the scenes with the cattle and the geese, and of the views of the civic clock

* The way in which popular opinion turns against Kosmos at the end, despite his grief at what happens to the teacher and the boy

* How raids against the cheese-shop, pharmacy and other premises influences residents against campaigning to re-open the border

* The use of CGI in making the snow and effects with the wind happen, as clearly no one could wait for it to be snowing to film a scene - once I became aware of this artificiality, I could not easily shut it out


As to the impression that the film left me with, it is an abiding and powerful one of a film-maker thoughtfully presenting a series of images and not insisting that any one way of looking at them is correct. This is as it should be with the best films, and this one compares very well with Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011).


End-notes

* Although some things that I could have sworn were to come never happened: a follow-up to the brush that Kosmos has with the tip of a lighted cigarette, in showing his immunity to cold, though I forget what, although I thought that it involved the stove.

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The cosmos of Kosmos

This is a Festival review of Kosmos (2010)

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

7 October

* Contains spoilers *

This is a Festival review of Kosmos (2010)

Kosmos is what he calls himself, when he is asked his name. He has previously saved the young woman’s brother, and he is delighted to hear her baying at him like a wolf, inviting him to follow her, to chase her. When he says that he is Kosmos, she says that she is Neptün, and I find myself thinking more of the seas, than of the planet. (Meeting the girl’s father, he gives a different name, but he is credited as Kosmos (Sermet Yesil), and she as Neptün (Türkü Turan.)

What we see is his visit to this indeterminate Muslim town in the snow, from when he arrives to when he leaves. All that we really know, as a foreign audience, is that he strays into areas where he should not be, that there are sounds of explosions, and that there is a border closed, which some would like opened, but which others say is just for their profit.

If we are trying to judge him, to see whether the words that he speaks when asked questions and which have a ring of teaching such as from the Koran or the book of Ecclesiastes, then we will find that he does things to disapprove of. (But don’t we all. He does not claim to be a great holy man, but answers people’s questions, and seems to seek to help.)

Ultimately, it is the disapproval, and the reliance that others have put upon him to cure as if it is without cost to himself (when we see at the start how he gives of himself to give life back to the boy whom he has rescued from the river), which cut short his time there. Some see him for who he is, but even the teacher, who sleeps with him, seeks to put her guilt on him – what he is looking for, he says, is love.

With Neptün, whether or not they sleep together, there is an unbridled energy and exuberance, a dance as of elemental forces such as their names suggest. Even his acts of healing, and what happens with natural phenomena (reminiscent of what Tarkovksy does in Mirror), suggest that he has a connection that others have forgotten about or overlooked, and which the girl sees in him more fully. The woman who places reliance in the medication Tralin® , an anti-depressant, seems at the opposite extreme, but he is nonetheless distressed for her.

The crash-landing of some sort of lunar module, which the authorities want hushed up, but which he has already seen, seem to herald a time when judgement turns against him, and he has to leave, although not without showing his care for those who are hurting. He leaves as he arrived, and, except when he is with Neptün, there is always an ambiguous quality about his anguish and about his joy, as if their being two sides of the same coin is very close to him.

This is a remarkable piece of cinema, and would invite me to see it again. What I would have to be clear about is not to do so to find out more about who Kosmos is, since we know only the time when he is with the people in this town and often have to guess at his motives or motivations, but to see how he is valued, to see what people see in him.



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