Come and See

The Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic was occupied by Nazi Germany for three years during WWII (1941- 1944).  Most of those taken prisoner and/or executed were Polish or Jewish.  Some were put into slave labor.  Entire villages were exterminated, often burned to the ground. Writer/director Elem Klimov adapted Ales Adamovich's I Am from the Fiery Village into 1985's COME AND SEE, rightfully regarded as one of the most intense and poetic of war films.  An astonishing and unnerving masterpiece.

Flyora (Aleksey Kravchenko) is a young Belarussian boy who, while playing around, digs up a rifle on the beach and the next day is conscripted by Soviet partisans in the fight against the Nazis.  The scene is set with a prolonged, highly uncomfortable sequence at his house, his mother and twin sisters helpless to keep the boy home.  He will be whisked away as a footman with low rank, not to be part of the platoon that will move beyond the local camp.  Dive bombers will level the camp and cause Flyora temporary deafness and tinnitus.  He will meet a mysterious nurse named Glasha, flirty but quick to dismiss him just the same.  In another stunning sequence, the pair make their way across a viscous bog, Flyora in denial that his family wasn't killed, and surely must be on the other side.

COME AND SEE slowly, deliberately, builds toward its jaw dropping final hour, after Flyora has accepted his mistakes (and his lot), losing comrades and even a cow along the way.  Klimov composes the natural beauty of the forest as a false idyll, what was previously home now a highway to hell.  An inferno ready to consume those not of the so-called master race.  Flyora's reconciliation of this, and his rapid, premature aging, is just heartbreaking.  When he reaches Perekhody, the townsfolk are assembled in houses and churches and burned to death by laughing SS troops and Ukrainian collaborators in sequences that are among the hardest to watch I've seen.  By the end, Flyora will find a poster of Adolph Hitler, beginning one of the most powerful montages in the history of cinema.

Criterion did another exemplary remaster with COME AND SEE, a film I've only been aware of for the past five or so years.  It is must viewing, even for the squeamish.  Klimov's style owes quite a bit to Terrence Malick, though most of the latter's films came some time after this one.  Cinematographer Aleksei Rodionov contributes haunting image after image.  Even the ugliness of the landscape and its action is beautiful in ways that defy definition.  The film's title is perfect, and an invitation to study and experience again and again all the layers within.  And be reminded.