Come and See
Come and See
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Synopsis

This towering, cathartic experience won the Grand Prize at the Moscow Film Festival. The story is based on writer Ales Adamovich's WWII memoirs of SS reprisals against partisans. Set in occupied Byelorussia in 1943, the film follows a raw teenager into the swamps and forests of the border provinces, where he undergoes a hell of atrocities, becoming a middle-aged wreck as he tries to survive the carnage. Remarkable acting, camera work, crowd scenes and direction raise the film far beyond anything comparable, as director Elem Klimov manages both a savage beauty and an impassioned elegy in this anti-war film. "It''s a masterpiece not only of filmmaking, but of humanity itself" (Sean Penn). In Russian with English subtitles. Elem Klimov---USSR---1985---142 mins.

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  • Currently 4/5 Stars.
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   | Lewis#4

Imagine a character with haunted eyes and a face bearing the signs of trauma and deprivation, shot in close-up and gazing into the camera. This recurring image--there are also remarkable tracking shots--provides a kind of visual signature for a film in which the horrors of war are presented unflinchingly. How do you make an anti-war film that doesn't unintentionally glamorize war? You make it about soldiers running amok among defenseless civilians. There are no heroes in the picture, only fiends, victims, and witnesses. The chief witness here is Florya (Aleksey Kravchenko), a young and not overly bright Byelorussian lad, eager to join his countrymen in their resistance to the invading Germans. (Like all the actors in this film, Kravchenko was a non-professional. After this first outing he went on to have a career in cinema.) Horrific events, including the incineration of an entire village with its inhabitants, soon mark paid to Florya's romanticized view of combat. He is no hero. Rather he is a passive and thoroughly traumatized survivor. He fires his rifle only once and non-lethally, perforating a picture of Hitler. This is a splendid, disturbing film, the last film of Elem Klimov, who lived eighteen more years without stepping behind a camera. (Interesting that he was married to Larisa Shepitko whose last, brilliant, film "The Ascent" told a similar story of Nazi monsters and helpless civilians.)

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  • Currently 5/5 Stars.
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   | James#58

This is a remarkable film that was horrifying and captivating at the same time. It is a depiction of war that fuses the real and the surreal. At first I thought that many of the camera shots were too long in duration but then realized that I was watching the faces of people whose humanity was being destroyed from within. This film is brutal, not because it is overwhelmingly gory (it is not) but rather because it depicts desperation and pulls no punches in allowing the viewer to see the brutality inflicted by the strong on the weak. This is all magnified by the fact that we know these atrocities occurred. Not for the weak but definitely for those who want to know.

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