Come and See (Russian: Иди и Ñмотри, Idi i smotri; Belarusian: Ідзі Ñ– глÑдзі, Idzi i hlyadzi) is a 1985 Soviet war drama film directed by Elem Klimov about and occurring during the Nazi German occupation of the Byelorussian SSR. Aleksei Kravchenko and Olga Mironova star as the protagonists Flyora and Glasha. The screenplay by Klimov and Ales Adamovich had to wait eight years for approval; the film was finally produced to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Soviet victory in World War II, and was a large box-office hit, with 28,900,000 admissions in the Soviet Union alone. The film was selected as the Soviet entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 58th Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee.
The film's title derives from Chapter 6 of The Apocalypse of John, in which "Come and see" is said in the first, third, fifth and seventh verses[Rev 6:1,3,5,7] as an invitation to look upon the destruction caused by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Chapter 6, verses 7-8[Rev 6:7-8] has been cited as being particularly relevant to the film: "And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see! And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth."
Plot
In 1943 two Belarusian boys are digging in a sand field looking for abandoned rifles in order to join the Soviet partisan forces. Yustin, an old man, warns them not to dig (using sarcasm and reverse psychology). One of the boys, Flyora (Aleksei Kravchenko), finds an SVT-40 rifle. The next day partisans arrive at his house and take Flyora with them, to the dismay of Flyora's mother. She fears that the loss of her son, like his father before him, will lessen her and her daughters' chances of survival.
The partisans converge in a forest and prepare to confront the Germans. Flyora joins their forces as a low-rank militiaman and is ordered to do all the labor in the detachment. When the partisans are ready to move on, their commander, Kosach (played by Liubomiras Lauciavicius and dubbed by Valeriy Kravchenko), orders Flyora to remain behind at the camp in reserve and exchange boots with one of his fellows. Bitterly disappointed, Flyora walks into the forest weeping and comes across someone else who has been left behind â€" Glafira (or Glasha, played by Olga Mironova), a beautiful girl infatuated with Kosach. The girl becomes delusional and confuses Flyora with Kosach and kisses him. Suddenly, German airplanes appear and begin to drop German parachutists, and the camp comes under heavy artillery fire causing Flyora to go deaf.
After hiding in the forest, the two return to Flyora's home village. His house is empty but his sisters' dolls are lined up on the floor and the place is overrun by flies. They find a still-warm dinner in the oven and try to eat, but Glasha vomits seeing the flies and dolls. Denying that his family was killed, Flyora believes that his family must be hiding on a nearby island across a bog. As they run from the village, Glasha turns and sees a huge pile of bodies stacked behind Flyora's house, but is unable to tell Flyora of it. Unable to accept that his family is dead, Flyora becomes hysterical as he and Glasha painstakingly wade through the bog. At the island they meet a resistance fighter, Roubej (played by Vladas Bagdonas). Glasha tells Roubej that Flyora is mad. Roubej takes the pair to a large number of other villagers who have fled the Germans. Flyora sees Yustin, who had been doused in petrol and burnt by the Germans, and accepts that his family did not survive.
Roubej takes Flyora and two others to find food, leaving Glasha to care for the rest of the villagers. They run into SS activity and the food stored is too well-defended to be raided. Flyora unknowingly leads the group through a minefield in which two of the companions are killed. A German plane drops empty liquor bottles. At dusk, Roubej and Flyora sneak up to an occupied town and manage to steal a cow from a German-collaborating farmer, but as they flee across the fields, they are shot at. Both Roubej and the cow are killed. The next morning, Flyora, unable to move the dead cow, finds a horse and cart. He attempts to take the horse at the dismay of the owner who stops Flyora. They hear the sound of approaching German soldiers. The farmer helps Flyora hide his partisan jacket and rifle in the field, and takes him to his village of Perekhody, where they hurriedly discuss a fake identity for him.
A German Einsatzkommando unit moves into the village, first surrounding the village. While Flyora is introduced to much of the farmer's family, a German officer comes inside of the house and the civilians give him food and water to eat. A collaborator also comes in the house and begins checking for anything valuable to take. Flyora starts walking outside of the house, but before he can step completely out, he is pushed down by a German soldier, much to the amusement of the other soldiers. The whole village is being herded by the German soldiers and Flyora attempts to warn everyone of their oncoming death, but is caught by another collaborator with a swastika drawn helmet and forced to run around in circles with the other men of the village. At first, the women and children are made to show their papers to the Germans, but then everyone is forced into the Village Church.
An Obersturmführer (played by Juri Lumiste) announces to the terrified people, "those without children can leave." Everyone inside the church calls the Germans, "Beasts." Flyora takes up the offer and climbs out of the church, only to be handled by a German sergeant and shown to the Sturmbannführer, the commanding officer of the German unit. He is then thrown down and Flyora watches as a woman and her child get climb out of the church. She is grabbed by German soldiers and her child is thrown back into the church, the woman being dragged by her hair by a Collaborator and then is made to stay too. Around the whole village, drunk Germans and Collaborators laugh and listen to music, many finding ways to entertain themselves. Grenades are then hurled into the church as a truck playing music parks near the other German vehicles. Molotov cocktails are then thrown at the church while a collaborator inside of the top of the church escapes out. All the soldiers clap and laugh as the people inside burn to death. The soldiers then start firing at the church. Flamethrowers ignite the church more and music keeps playing to the sounds of the people dying inside the church. The Collaborators use most of the people that got out to herd the animals and Flyora is used in a picture, A German officer points a gun to his head while they pose for a picture. The officer does not kill him and leaves him to die.
The woman who was dragged by the hair is thrown into a moving truck and presumably gang raped by the soldiers in the truck. The soldiers leave the burning village and carry an old woman outside to watch them as they leave, torches in many of the soldier's hands and music can still be heard playing as they drive away from the inferno. Flyora lies face down on the ground and is kicked by a motorcycle riding German soldier.
Flyora wanders out of the village, where he sees that the partisan soldiers have ambushed the Germans as they fled from the burning village. He then goes to recover his rifle and jacket from the field where he had hid them earlier. As he turns to leave, Flyora comes across a woman with a strong resemblance to Glasha who has been horrifically raped and is in a fugue state; it is unclear if this is indeed Glasha or Flyora imagining the woman who escaped from the church as her. Flyora returns to the destroyed village and finds that his fellow partisans have captured eleven of the attackers and the Byelorussian collaborators, including the collaborator with the swastika helmet and the German SS commander. The main collaborator (played by Yevgeni Tilicheyev), the same on who dragged the woman by the hair and carried out the old woman, insisting that they are not to blame for the slaughter, translates the words of the German commander (played by Viktor Lorents), who claims to be a good man and a doting grandfather. The Obersturmführer is disgusted and angered by his commander's cowardice, and tells his captors that they, as an inferior race and communist sympathizers, will eventually be exterminated. The main collaborator tells that the Germans forced them to take part in the massacre. Kosach says the collaborators must pay, but not before the Germans. The collaborators, except the soldier with the swastika helmet, douse the Germans with the can of petrol Flyora brought, but the crowd, disgusted by the sight, shoot them all down before they can be set on fire, ending their lives relatively painlessly.
As the partisans leave, Flyora notices a framed portrait of Adolf Hitler in a puddle and shoots it - the first time he has actually used his rifle. After each shot, there is a sequence of montages that play in reverse and regress in time, depicting the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich backwards from corpses at a concentration camp to images of Hitler as a schoolboy; and finally a picture of the infant Adolf in his mother's lap. Flyora shoots at each of the images â€" yet he cannot bring himself to fire at the still shot of baby Hitler. A title card states that "628 villages in Byelorussia were burnt to the ground with all their inhabitants."
In the film's final scene, Flyora catches up with and blends in with his partisan comrades marching through the woods, away into the dark of the trees.
Cast
- Aleksey Kravchenko as Flyora
- Olga Mironova as Glasha
- Liubomiras Lauciavicius as Kosach
- Jüri Lumiste as German officer
- Evgeniy Tilicheev as Collaborator
Production
Klimov co-wrote the screenplay with Ales Adamovich, who fought with the Belarussian partisans as a teenager. According to the director's recollections, work on the film began in 1977:
For a long time, filming could not begin. The State Committee for Cinematography (Goskino) would not accept the screenplay, considering it a propaganda for the "aesthetics of dirtiness" and "naturalism". In the end, Klimov was able to start filming in 1984 without having compromised to any censorship at all. The only change became the name of the film itself, which was changed to Come and See from the original title, Kill Hitler (Elem Klimov also says this in the 2006 UK DVD release).
The film was shot in chronological order over a period of nine months. Aleksey Kravchenko says that he underwent "the most debilitating fatigue and hunger. I kept a most severe diet, and after the filming was over I returned to school not only thin, but grey-haired." The 2006 UK DVD sleeve states that the guns in the film were often loaded with live ammunition as opposed to blanks, for realism. Aleksey Kravchenko mentions in interviews that bullets sometimes passed just 4Â inches (10 centimeters) above his head (such as in the cow scene).
Music
The original soundtrack is rhythmically amorphous music composed by Oleg Yanchenko. At a few key points in the film existing music is used, sometimes mixed in with Yanchenko's music (such as Johann Strauss Jr.'s Blue Danube). At the end, during the montage, music by Richard Wagner is used, most notably the Tannhäuser Overture and the Ride from Die Walküre. The conclusion of the film uses the Lacrimosa from Mozart's Requiem. The Soviet marching song "The Sacred War" is also played in the movie once. During the scene where Glasha dances, the background music is taken from Grigori Aleksandrov's 1936 film Circus.
Reception
Come and See is widely considered a critical success, appearing on many lists of films considered the best. Film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports a 95% approval critic response based on 21 reviews, with a "Certified Fresh" and a weighted average score of 8.1/10.
According to Klimov, the film was so shocking for audiences that ambulances were sometimes called in to take away particularly impressionable viewers, both in the Soviet Union and abroad. During one of the after-the-film discussions, an elderly German stood up and said: "I was a soldier of the Wehrmacht; moreover, an officer of the Wehrmacht. I traveled through all of Poland and Belarus, finally reaching Ukraine. I will testify: everything that is told in this film is the truth. And the most frightening and shameful thing for me is that this film will be seen by my children and grandchildren."
Walter Goodman, writing for The New York Times, claimed that "The history is harrowing and the presentation is graphic... Powerful material, powerfully rendered...", dismissed the ending as "a dose of instant inspirationalism," but concedes to Klimov's "unquestionable talent." Rita Kempley, of the Washington Post, wrote that "directing with an angry eloquence, [Klimov] taps into that hallucinatory nether world of blood and mud and escalating madness that Francis Ford Coppola found in Apocalypse Now. And though he draws a surprisingly vivid performance from his inexperienced teen lead, Klimov's prowess is his visual poetry, muscular and animistic, like compatriot Andrei Konchalovsky's in his epic Siberiade." Mark Le Fanu wrote in Sight and Sound (03/01/1987) that Come and See is a "powerful war film... The director has elicited an excellent performance form his central actor Kravchenko." Writing about Come and See, Daneet Steffens of Entertainment Weekly (11/02/2001) wrote that "Klimov alternates the horrors of war with occasional fairy tale-like images; together they imbue the film with an unapologetically disturbing quality that persists long after the credits roll." Geoffrey Macnab of Sight and Sound (05/01/2006) wrote that "Klimov's astonishing war movie combines intense lyricism with the kind of violent bloodletting that would make even Sam Peckinpah pause."
In 2001, J. Hoberman of The Village Voice reviewed Come and See, writing the following: "Directed for baroque intensity, Come and See is a robust art film with aspirations to the visionary â€" not so much graphic as leisurely literal-minded in its representation of mass murder. (The movie has been compared both to Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, and it would not be surprising to learn that Steven Spielberg had screened it before making either of these.) The film's central atrocity is a barbaric circus of blaring music and barking dogs in which a squadron of drunken German soldiers round up and parade the peasants to their fiery doom... The bit of actual death-camp corpse footage that Klimov uses is doubly disturbing in that it retrospectively diminishes the care with which he orchestrates the town's destruction. For the most part, he prefers to show the Gorgon as reflected in Perseus's shield. There are few images more indelible than the sight of young Alexei Kravchenko's fear-petrified expression. By some accounts the boy was hypnotized for the movie's final scenes â€" most viewers will be as well." In the same publication in 2009, Elliott Stein described Come and See as "a startling mixture of lyrical poeticism and expressionist nightmare."
In 2002, Scott Tobias of The A.V. Club wrote that Klimov's "impressions are unforgettable: the screaming cacophony of a bombing run broken up by the faint sound of a Mozart fugue, a dark, arid field suddenly lit up by eerily beautiful orange flares, German troops appearing like ghosts out of the heavy morning fog. A product of the glasnost era, Come and See is far from a patriotic memorial of Russia's hard-won victory. Instead, it's a chilling reminder of that victory's terrible costs."
British magazine The Word wrote that "Come and See is widely regarded as the finest war film ever made, though possibly not by Great Escape fans." Tim Lott wrote in 2009 that the film "makes Apocalypse Now look lightweight".
On 16 June 2010, Roger Ebert posted a review of Come and See as part of his "Great Movies" series, describing it as "one of the most devastating films ever about anything, and in it, the survivors must envy the dead... The film depicts brutality and is occasionally very realistic, but there's an overlay of muted nightmarish exaggeration... I must not describe the famous sequence at the end. It must unfold as a surprise for you. It pretends to roll back history. You will see how. It is unutterably depressing, because history can never undo itself, and is with us forever."
The film was placed at number 60 on Empire magazines "The 500 Greatest Movies of all Time" in 2008. Come and See was also included in Channel 4's list of 50 Films to See Before You Die and was ranked number 24 in Empire magazines "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema" in 2010. Phil de Semlyen of Empire has described Come and See as "Elim Klimov’s seriously influential, deeply unsettling Belarussian opus. No film â€" not Apocalypse Now, not Full Metal Jacket â€" spells out the dehumanising impact of conflict more vividly, or ferociously... An impressionist masterpiece and possibly the worst date movie ever."
Elem Klimov did not make any more films after Come and See, leading some critics to speculate as to why. In 2001, Klimov said, "I lost interest in making films ... Everything that was possible I felt I had already done." Klimov died on 26 October 2003.
Accolades
See also
- List of submissions to the 58th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film
- List of Soviet submissions for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film
References
Further reading
- Michaels, Lloyd (2008). "Come and See (1985): Klimov's Intimate Epic". Quarterly Review of Film and Video 25 (3): 212â€"218. doi:10.1080/10509200601091458.Â
External links
- Come and See at the Internet Movie Database
- Come and See at Rotten Tomatoes
- Come and See at official Mosfilm site