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This legendary film from Soviet director Elem Klimov is a senses-shattering plunge into the dehumanizing horrors of war. As Nazi forces encroach on his small village in Belorussia, teenage Flyora (Alexei Kravchenko, in a searing depiction of anguish) eagerly joins the Soviet resistance. Rather than the adventure and glory he envisioned, what he finds is a waking nightmare of unimaginable carnage and cruelty—rendered with a feverish, otherworldly intensity by Klimov’s subjective camera work and expressionistic sound design. Nearly blocked from being made by Soviet censors, who took seven years to approve its script, Come and See is perhaps the most visceral, impossible-to-forget antiwar film ever made. (Criterion)
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Come and See is fascinating and unique in many ways. Firstly, in terms of historical plausibility and significance – it’s not hard to imagine that this is exactly what happened in those six hundred Belarusian villages in 1943. The Germans marched merrily through the area and, in between humiliating and sexually abusing the local population, chased the villagers into barns and set them on fire. The local youth lived in misery and out of general indignation they allowed themselves to be recruited by the partisans, because they wanted to fight heroically for their people. The corpses piled up, innocent people were doused with gasoline and set on fire simply because 'their race has no right to a future', and the poor survivors carried with them a lifetime of trauma etched into every wrinkle on their faces. Come and See depicts all this not only believably, but also intensely and thoughtfully. The protagonist, the young partisan Flyora, goes through an increasingly violent and horrific ordeal, and for most of the time the camera sticks like a tick to his sensory, visual and even auditory perspective. He begins as a well-mannered, conscientious and optimistic young man, but the events drastically transform his emotions, psyche and appearance. Almost all visual and acoustic features are subjectivised, putting us directly into the protagonist's head, a place nobody would want to be in, especially in the second half. And that is one hell of a devastating spectacle full of filth and mental and physical pain, with a soundtrack that follows dizziness and simulates the greatest human agony... and well, you can take poison for that. And at the same time it’s absolutely unlike any Hollywood war film, which are more fond of artificial dramatization and strong heroism. There are also some poetic elements or editing techniques closer to the European modernism of the 1960s, which sometimes evoke the aura of an art festival. At the same time, it's notable that director Elem Klimov opts for mostly dynamic camera rides and follows moving characters, bringing the style back to Hollywood, even contemporary Hollywood – I could personally imagine, that if Spielberg had this script today (or back in the 1980s), he would stage many of the more action-packed passages very similarly, using long takes and multiple smaller storylines in one take that would gradually interweave and build on each other. Moreover, it is a film that absolutely denies the popular Soviet cult of personality, cultivated under Stalin, which made national heroes out of ordinary protagonists of films or literary works. No one is a hero here, everyone is a victim of an incomprehensible murderous and ideological machine that either makes you mad or sucks all the life out of you, an innocent child. Personally, I consider Come and See to be such an exceptionally shot, effective and precisely consolidated film in every single way that I would rank Klimov among the best directors of the 1980s for this alone. This despite the indiscriminate treatment of the child actors, who obviously went through hell – especially Alexei Kravchenko, Flyora, must have endured the unimaginable and I'm surprised he didn't quit acting afterwards.
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A tragic image of war, destroying everything not only physically but forever destroying even those who were not directly affected at first sight. The expression on the main protagonist's face speaks for itself - attempting to squeeze such horror and inhumanity, which he witnessed, into ordinary (not only cinematic) phrases is simply impossible. Just like it is impossible to truly comprehend the fact of more than 20,000,000 killed inhabitants of the Soviet Union, truly enormous, yet still only one single country. The final scene is thus an example of the genius of the film, and of cinema itself.
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Incredibly psychologically depressing for its time, brutal in places, especially in the second half (I think it was the only Soviet film that was released in cinemas under the Bolshevik regime with the rating "No access to children under 18!"), an extremely impressive film from the time of the Nazi extermination campaign in the Soviet Union. A little boy's family is murdered and he joins the partisans. After the opening, somewhat drawn-out half-hour, Klimov begins to emotionally pummel the viewer with such vigour that it's borderline unbearable in places. During filming, a psychiatrist was constantly by the boy lead's side to make sure that the psychologically demanding filming did not take a toll on his mental health – without success, though. In terms of direction, it’s brilliant. There are two scenes I’ll never forget, the first is when the protagonist walks through his native village, which had been massacred by the Nazis a few days before. There are no naturalistic shots, only subtle, frightening hints, and a single glance through the camera, as if in passing, illuminates the horrific reality. And the second scene at the end, a scene that went down in film history: the slaughter of a Belarusian village by SS troops, and the burning of its inhabitants in a nearby barn. The ghetto-clearing scene in Spielberg's Schindler's List doesn’t come even close. It’s hard to describe, you have to see it. An unforgettable experience.
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Boredom – boredom – powerful scene. Boredom – filler – powerful scene. Filler – filler – hugely powerful scene. Over and over. A strong, but not at all exception message (you can “find" it elsewhere), and it doesn’t really work as a movie; it is too unrefined in its messages and puts its money on the gut reaction to wartime atrocities. But if you let the distinctive rhythm of the storytelling wave over you and allow yourself be stirred from you trance only for the powerful scenes, then you will find this a rewarding watch. So it’s a sort of “wake up and take a look" affair.
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Yuck! It's not "yuck" in terms of the film's quality, but it's "yuck" in terms of what a person is capable of. I know, it's just a movie, but it could easily be a documentary because these atrocities do happen. And sometimes you don't even need blood to be knocked out by a scene. For example, the photo shoot is incredibly scary.
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