#272: Come and See
Some movies are only meant to be seen once
This review was originally posted to Twitter on June 13, 2020.
Initial release: July 9, 1985
Director: Elem Klimov
(1985, d. elem klimov):
Is there a war movie that actually proves Truffaut wrong?
Can war movies be considered horror films without supernatural/sci-fi elements?
Is there a World War 2 movie that is as soul-sucking as Schindler’s List if not even worse?
Christ, where do I even fucking start with Elem Klimov’s Come and See? Having sat through the movie’s two hours and change, I feel like I’ve died. I feel like my lifespan has shortened. Every minute spent watching this movie, thinking about it, writing about it, is a minute off my life.
It starts out simply enough. It’s 1943. Two boys in occupied Belarus, one maybe 10, the other around 13, are digging for abandoned rifles so they can join the Soviet partisans. After finding one, the eldest, Flyora, takes it home, and is soon pressed into service. Over the coming weeks, he will go from a bright-eyed, idealistic kid to a haunted, frightened husk of his former self, utterly sapped of his humanity. He will bear witness to horrifying things; he will see some of the worst that World War II has to offer.
This is one of the bleakest films I have ever seen in my life. It is a brutal, uncompromising vision of what it’s like to be a child soldier in wartime, of life under the Nazi jackboot. It is an aggressively surrealistic nightmare of expressionist filmmaking. When it’s not drilling your brain with intense, sinister drones — of airplanes, of the ringing in Flyora’s ears after a bombing, of the soundtrack — it’s an odyssey of noises, a nightmarishly cacophonous shitshow that threatens sensory overload. It starts off unsettling to begin with, with an old man screaming into a seemingly empty waste. But we’re treated to a lot of close-ups, many of them shot with steadicam so that as they move their heads, the camera moves with them.
We’re soon introduced to Glasha, a gorgeous blonde girl working as a nurse in the partisan camp before being left behind; she comes off as weird and soon ratchets that up to creepy; it’s up in the air whether she’s even real, or just a figment of Flyora’s imagination.
The first half of the film is rough: flyora gone deaf from explosions; desperately telling himself that his family is simply out for the moment as flies descend on unfinished meals; the pile of naked corpses he doesn’t see; a moment where he and Glasha nearly drown in a bog. Animal cruelty laws apparently don’t exist in Belarus, as we’re treated to a disillusioned Flyora accidentally stepping on a bird’s nest, and later, a cow being shot while Flyora and another partisan are trying to steal it, a moment that Klimov lingers on for quite some time.
But the second half makes the first half look like Spongebob. Most of the back end of the film is dedicated to a horde of Nazi SS troopers descending upon a remote village; a carnival atmosphere dominates as they carouse and enjoy themselves while they abuse the villagers and burn them alive. The sheer abject noise of this lengthy sequence threatens to drive the audience mad; it’s non-stop, full of screams and drunken laughter, and the burp of flamethrowers and the collapse of burning structures. The film reaches its most darkly surreal moment — in a movie full of darkly surreal moments — when we see a gorgeous-looking Nazi woman watching the carnage her fellows are wreaking from her seat in a truck while slowly, sensuously, eating lobster.
And then, finally, at long last, it’s over. After forcing Flyora to his knees and using him for a twisted photoshoot, the Nazis discard him and leave, leaving a broken Flyora laying in the dirt amidst the burning ruins of the village. Not long after, he finds the Nazis again, this time dead, dying or captured by the very partisans who’d abandoned him; when it comes time to mete out punishment, Flyora doesn’t hesitate to hand over a gas can he’d taken — but in the end, the Nazis are merely all shot instead.
In the final scene, a broken, prematurely-aged Flyora finds a picture of Hitler, and after spending the whole movie lugging his rifle around with nothing to shoot at, he fires into it, imagining Hitler going back in time with each shot, all the way to infancy — but there, he stops. The unspoken question is obvious: can you kill a child to change the future? Could all this have been prevented?
In Flyora’s tears, there are no answers.
