COME AND SEE, Soviet filmmaker Elem Klimov's fifth and final feature film, is the pièce de résistance of anti-war affidavit, through the eyes of a 14-year-old Belorussian boy Flyora (Kravchenko), whose life is plunged into ceaseless nightmares after being conscripted into the Soviet partisan army in the German-occupied Belorussia, 1943.
Unlike Tarkovsky's similarly themed IVAN'S CHILDHOOD, Flyora is not sidelined for the absolute horror committed by the Nazis, and he is, albeit passively, right in the middle of it, during which, his childlike innocence is being chipped away piece by piece, from a chipper rifle rummager, to an aggrieved left-behind grunt worker deafened by strafing, then a guilt-buffeted orphan trying to survive amid peppering bullets, until a stunned, fugue-stricken witness of inhuman barbarity and its aftermath, All, poignantly captured by Klimov's trailing camera, often in disorienting subjective angles, extreme close-ups, or close-quarter long takes, to upmost felicity and visceral empathy.
Propping its fervid war-condemning leitmotif, COME AND SEE is a helluva accomplishment in all aspects: visually, high include points but not exclusively, an enveloping dusky mist, an animistic overtone (a heron astray, a cow riddled by bullets), the bog -wading murkiness and the physical exertion it involves (from both Kravchenko and Mironova, who plays the young nurse Glasha, is another haunting, heart-rending presence, not least for her passing glance of that pile of cadavers), a hellacious exhibition of a severely burnt man murmuring the oversight of his foresight, and a barn set ablaze when a pogrom reaches its crescendo, even Flyora's makeup, his creased forehead (as if he has been weathered over a decade all of a sudden) is (almost) as startling as the atrocity in display; sonically, Flyora's deafened vacuum, the flies-whirring persistence,all heighten and sensitize our perception effectually.
Montage is another irrefutable forte in Soviet cinema, which, Klimov avails himself of near the end with explosive bravura, footage of Hitler's life is played in reverse, frantically alternated with Flyora unleashing his repressed, anguished outpourings, only stops when that monster is still a toddler, proposing the hypothetical question, would you kill a baby Hitler if you could go back to the past and alter the harrowing history? A forewarning exhorts that human race should never ever retread the same path of the Holocaust, and we all ought to be vigilant to nip any straw in the wind in the bud.
COME AND SEE is also blessed for teasing out a soul-shattering performance from Kravchenko, and his horror-struck visages can be legitimately canonized among the most powerful snapshots in film history, though Flyora is a mere cipher, an unfortunate onlooker or more precisely, a fortunate survivor, passively embroiled in the man-made atrocity that is beyond his wildest imagination. Laucevicius, who plays the partisan's commander, also imbuing an indelible grimness that makes an accompanying portrait with Floyra's, so are the singular characters of several German SS officers and their Ukrainian lackeys, when they are rounded up by the partisans with death knell tolling, Klimov's uncompromising exposé dares to see evil with an unflinching glare, and what a glare!
referential entries: Andrei Tarkovsky's IVAN'S CHILDHOOD (1962, 8.2/10); László Nemes' SON OF SAUL (2015, 7.4/10).
View more about Come and See reviews
