For this one, we abandon sunny dispositions as we look at an uncompromising anti-war film that hasn’t exactly decreased in pertinence—with new attention drawn to it in recent times, here’s my take on Elem Klimov’s Come and See.
Inspired by a memoir by Belarussian writer Ales Adamovich, Come and See languished for several years before seeing production—needless to say, the tone was markedly different from the usual patriotic-flavored Soviet war cinema, with even its feeling of ‘naturalism’ apparently being too bourgeois for state sensibilities. Klimov was able to get things through when more personable officials did him favors—but even then, the object of the film was less to do with any glorification of party line than it was to frame what had happened in the villages and rural lands of Belarus some forty-odd years prior.
From the very beginning, we have Klimov’s style established. We have a mixture of the discordant and the surreal, balanced with the brutally realistic—there’s lots of facial close-ups, reminding me almost of Robert Eggers somewhat, that get ever more uncomfortable as the film goes on. The harshness of the aesthetic is set up with the opening titles, a long shot of a bleak landscape with a distorted and muffled patriotic song serving as score.
There’s a fever dream feeling hanging over every scene, fitting I guess as it’s ultimately based on the rather painful memories of one man—and yet, that’s punctuated by some very powerful production. Bombs going off feel like actual violent ordnance blasting holes into a forest, rather than the usual squibs we see in other films. There’s a scene at dusk where tracer fire rains overhead, using real bullets, for some rather harrowing intensity. A scene where two characters struggle through a bog is all too real, and lack of cuts leave little to the imagination. Klimov uses extended shots to rather gruelling effect, forcing us to confront every thing we see.
On a personal note, I do know family members who also saw similar events in nearby regions around the same time—a lot of it, like peasants undergoing terrifying visits by occupiers or having their food and animals summarily taken by partisans, rings all too true. And, of course, there were the certain Nazi soldiers to be avoided at all costs, even by children.
Aleksei Kravchenko plays our lead Florian, a young boy recruited by local partisans—though there’s no glory in it for this little soldier, performing menial tasks wading through mud and bogs, or lugging buckets while under fire. Kravchenko’s face seems to genuinely age twenty years as things go on, part of it being real, part of it being makeup that he had to deal with for a while. Eventually, any aspiration turns to a matter of pure survival as he finds himself in the midst of a village about to be torn apart by oncoming Nazi soldiers.
And, befittingly, there’s no climactic battle at hand—merely prisoners either begging for mercy or snarling racial supremacism, with executions following under stone-faced commissars. The final sequence goes all in on surrealism, and though it goes on for a little too long before literally spelling out its point, is all too memorable as punctuation to proceedings.
It’s certainly not a film you can forget, and wildly different from many other war productions produced in the communist bloc (Four Tank Men and a Dog is positively candyfloss next to this, for instance). Certainly, it seemed to be received much more widely in the west—there hasn’t been much of its kind made in its homeland since. And, in more recent years, films there like ‘Leaving Afghanistan’ were attacked for having the nerve to portray the Soviet war in Afghanistan as not well conceived—many things can be said about Hollywood’s takes on history, but that was an environment that could give us things like Apocalypse Now and Platoon.
It’s true that those that fail to heed history are doomed to repeat it—as are those that would only have history be what they want it to be.
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