Pros: A powerful antiwar message together with truly gorgeous cinematography
Cons: Viewers need to be emotionally prepared for dealing with brutal atrocities depicted realistically
The Bottom Line: Highly recommended as a powerful war and antiwar film with technically brilliant cinematography and sound. Puts most Hollywood war film to shame!
Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.
Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985) has to be one of the best kept secrets in the entire pantheon of films. It is not only emotionally staggering but also visually stunning. It manages to deal with one of the most depressing topics imaginable – ethnic cleansing – without any compromise, and yet to be a masterful work of art at the same time. Come and See (or Idi I Smotri in Russian) depicts the ugly reality of a brutal genocide perpetrated by occupying Nazi forces in Byelorussia in 1943 as seen through the eyes of a fourteen year-old boy. It is also the eloquent story of innocence shattered. Come and See, unlike so many Hollywood war films, fully de-glamorizes war, thus providing one of the most intense and realistic war (and antiwar) films ever produced. The director, Elem Klimov, was born in 1933 and began his film career specializing in documentaries. He irritated the Soviet authorities with his first major work called Rasputin (1977), which featured the mad monk who held so much sway over the Czar’s family at the beginning of the twentieth century. With Come and See, however, Klimov worked his way back into the graces of Soviet authorities to such an extent that he was made head of the Soviet Filmmakers Association a few years ago. Come and See was either his last film or his last to reach the West.
The Story: The film opens with two teen lads digging frantically among shallow graves in the hopes of finding a rifle. One of the boys, Florya (Alexei Krachenko) hopes to join the partisans who are preparing for resistance against the imminent Nazi invasion. An old man yells at them as they hide, warning them not to become involved in the war. When he departs, the boys continue the search, clowning with one another as boys do, while digging with deadly earnestness. A German reconnaissance plane glides by overhead. Florya (Flor for short) strikes gold: with considerable effort he pulls up the sought-after rifle and lifts it into the air in triumph.
Flor’s mother is utterly distraught at the idea of Flor joining the partisans. Not only does she fear for his safety, she also needs him at home to help her care for and protect his little twin sisters. Flor is determined, however, and so too are the local recruiters who need every able-bodied man or, in this event, boy.
Flor joins other older soldiers at a bivouac site and is assigned chores like scrubbing the pots. When the order comes for the unit to move out, Flor gets left behind because a more experienced soldier is desperately in need of better boots – Flor’s boots. The only other person left behind is the daughter of the unit’s leader, a comely but rather strange girl named Glasha (Olga Mironova). She is only a year or two older than Flor and they are left behind to tend the troop site. They set up to camp in the nearby woods. Glasha begins to cry but Flor coaxes her out of it by making funny faces and mocking her as she whimpers. In a beautifully filmed sequence, they joke playfully with one another among the trees, alternately cheering each other up and freaking each other out. Suddenly, however, their simple joys of childhood are shattered by intense explosions at the campsite. Although neither is injured, the blasts are so loud that Flor suffers tinnitus, hearing loss, and disorientation. In a magnificent bit of creative sound engineering, we hear the ringing in Florya’s ears and the muffled sounds that he hears when Glasha speaks. An injured stork comes sauntering through the woods every bit as disoriented as Flor. Flor and Glasha settle down for the night side by side. When they awaken, all is quiet and they take the opportunity to “shower” in the dew drops, one standing under a canopy of a tree while the other shakes its trunk vigorously to unleash the water drops. This is another bit of cinematography that has to be seen to be believed – it is beautiful beyond description. Soon, they see a force of paratroopers dropping out of the sky some distance away.
They must abandon the campsite and Florya decides that their best course of action is to head back to his home. His mother will be delighted, he imagines, both by his return and Glasha’s company. When they reach Florya’s home, his mother and sisters are nowhere to be seen. The house is in a bit of disarray, but they sit to eat some of the soup still on the stove. Suddenly, Flor begins to imagine the worst. He rushes from the house to try to locate his family. Most likely they have gone to the island in the middle of the swamp with other townspeople where they would be safe from the Nazis. Glasha follows a bit behind Florya and when she momentarily glances back, she spies the unthinkable – a pile of perhaps forty naked corpses behind one of the cabins. She tries to scream but is unable to get it out. Flor and Glasha wade neck deep through the muddy swamp to the secret island hiding place. There they discover some villagers huddled together, wet and cold. One man is stretched out, charred and near death. He had been burned alive by the Nazis. Flor learns that all of his family was killed. He is distraught beyond comprehension and has to be restrained from drowning himself by sticking his head into a pit of mud. The surviving mothers care for Flor, cut his hair, and help him recover a semblance of composure. They group amuses itself by constructing a mock Hitler effigy using a skull, sticks, and a swastika. They take turns spitting on the effigy and verbally taunting it.
Florya is sent with a group of three men to seek food. Two of the men are soon killed by artillery fire. Flor and the remaining man locate a cow, which they begin to lead across an open field back toward their fellow villagers. Suddenly, machine gun fire begins to whiz by and explode all around them. Since the gun is firing tracer bullets, we see the trajectory of the bullets clearly. Flor’s last companion is killed and soon thereafter the cow. Flor is pinned down and has to sleep in the field but escapes in the morning fog. He encounters a farmer with a horse and wagon. He intents to commandeer the horse and wagon and to use it to cart pieces of the cow back to his hungry friends. Suddenly, however, a large group of German trucks can be heard nearby approaching the town. Florya hides his rifle and military belt under a haystack and goes with the farmer into the town, planning to masquerade as a boy of the town. That plan turns out to be useless, however, since the intent of the Germans is to massacre the town’s entire populace. All of the people of the town are herded first into the village square and then into a church. Those without children are allowed to exit the church through a window. Florya climbs out and is taken captive, but the church is then burned to the ground with all of its occupants. Outside, the Germans behave as though they were at a festive carnival. They drink, laugh, and cheer as the barn goes up in flames and fire their guns into the church for good measure. The German commander sits in his jeep stroking his pet loris. Everyone in the town is killed except for one old grandmother and Florya, who is forced to pose for a picture with some German officers, on his knees with a gun to his head. Inexplicably, the Germans seem to take joy in leaving just one or two alive as if to relish their ability to dictate live or death on a whim.
Florya meets up with some other survivors. A few Germans have been captured. They are interrogated and some plead their relative innocence while another arrogantly belittles his captors, saying, “Your nation doesn’t have a right to exist. Inferior races spread the microbe of communism.” There’s that old “master-race” mentality – yet what they had mainly mastered was inhuman brutality! They are all shot and, indeed, were fortunate not to have been tortured or burned alive. Florya has seen more than his mind can comprehend or withstand. He is utterly shell-shocked, with a stunned, blank look on his face. It has been all too many horrors. As the surviving men form up into a platoon and march off, Florya lags behind, giving vent to his rage by wildly shooting a painting of the Madonna and Child laying on the ground, symbolically rejecting the religion that failed to provide even the most basic moral guidance. As Flor shoots, Klimov inserts some newsreel clips (some cleverly run backwards, others speeded up, or alternately run forward and backward to mock the goose-stepping Nazis and Hitler’s rhetorical gestures). The clips effectively relate the local events we have witnessed to the larger issues of Hitler’s madness as well as the subsequent war effort by which Germany was defeated. Flor recovers himself in time to race to catch up with the squadron of Russian soldiers. As the squad walks through the woods in the dusk with light glistening through the trees, we hear ethereal choral strains from Mozart. It is an amazing closing sequence – one of the most beautiful I’ve ever encountered in film.
Production Values: The making of this film was a difficult and grueling production, according to the interviews included with the DVD version. Most of the camera work utilized a hand-held unit. The performance by Alexei Krachenko is amazingly intense, all the more so because he had never previously acted. Krachenko seems to age by decades in the course of the few days that this film encompasses. Most especially in mental age.
Other than the powerful anti-war message, the highlight of this film is its visual poetry. The entire films is composed in a distinctive color palette consisting of browns, grays, dark greens, and deep golds. The result is utterly gorgeous cinematography that is as much an exploration of light and color as it is of human depravity. This is a film that features first and foremost landscapes and faces, with fog and haze the featured element in both instances. In the faces, it is the fog and haze created by terror. The deep shock evident in Florya’s countenance builds inexorably over the entire course of the film, as he moves from one terrible tragedy to another. Miraculously, Klimov finds a way to deliver the deeply disturbing lesson from this unthinkable business of genocide in a way that is rendered tolerable by the stunning visual beauty of the film. The two early scenes in the woods provide a degree of deep comfort while the final one is nothing less than a precious triumph of tranquility amidst the horror of war.
Bottom-Line:Come and See is an inadequately heralded masterpiece that reveals the Nazi atrocities in Byelorussia in all their grand depravity. It is a kind of coming-of-age film as well, although reflecting a kind of abrupt loss of innocence that we would prefer that no child have to endure. Florya is agonizingly transformed in just a few short days. This is a film that enriches both the war film genre and the coming-of-age genre. All told, the Nazis burned 628 villages in Byelorussia along with all their inhabitants.
Come and See won the Grand Prix at the Moscow Film Festival. It is in Russian with English subtitles. Since the dialogue is sparse, even slow readers will find the subtitles easy to manage. The running time is 142 minutes. The DVD version has interviews with Klimov (the director), Kravchenko (the teen lead actor, now an adult), and the film designer. There are also two interesting vintage Russian newsreels dealing with Nazi atrocities and the partisan resistance. This is a magnificent film that deserves a wider audience. Once, when Sean Penn was invited to select a favorite film to be shown at a film festival, this is the film he chose. I wonder if the audience was emotionally prepared for such a wrenching experience.
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