Come and See
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Movie Reviews of Come and See
Movie Review: A Haunting, Epic, Terrifying Masterwork.
Summary: 5 Stars
Elem Klimov's "Come And See" is one of the great war films, it is great because it does not depend purely on action scenes, cardboard character heroes or pounding music. This is a film with a soul, it is a haunting, timeless vision that takes place during a specific moment in history but can be applied anywhere.
It is typical in America to glorify our role in WWII and the downfall of Hitler, but it is easy to forget that the Soviet Union took the brunt of Hitler's assault during the massive, insane Operation Barbarossa. "Come And See" takes us on the ground with the civilians, villagers, resistance militias and soldiers who experienced the fury of Hitler's fascist troops. Some ignorant reviewers here condemn the film as "Communist propaganda." Why? Because it is Communists being assaulted and defending themselves? Should the Nazis be given a better deal here? This is a powerful work of art that documents a historical event, a historical truth. Klimov uses this moment in history to create a broader, poetic piece that has actual human characters, not falsely heroic personas out of "Saving Private Ryan" who sound as if they are reciting lines from the latest Go Army commercial.
Klimov focuses primarily on two young Belarussians, Florya (Aleksei Kravchenko) and Glasha (Olga Mironova) who are caught in the middle of the Nazi onslaught on the USSR. Florya, a young boy is recruited into the local militia and meets Florya. There might be a hint of a blossoming love, but soon the German troops begind landing from the sky and the dogs of war are unleashed. What is so brilliant about Klimove's approach is that he does not make a conventional action movie, instead he let's the characters speak, share ideas, express hopes, desires and fears. We don't get the sense that war is heroic or fun, it is a dark, terrifying experience where the worst in human nature is unleashed. The cinematography is beautiful, gritty and hypnotic. Pay close attention to the sound editing as well, it is a masterful example of creating atmosphere, tension and emotion.
The second half of the film will be hard for many to take, especially the scenes of a Nazi rampage through a village. Anyone who has read Antony Beevor's brilliant book "Stalingrad" should be well-versed in Nazi tactics used on villages as they dug deeper into the USSR, but Klimov never shies away from the horrific reality, the brutality and terror. He presents images and sequences that stay in the memory, that provoke outrage and sadness. And yet Klimov does keep alive a sense of hope and strength as we see the local communities unite to resist the occupation of their country. Americans should force themselves to consider our own times, as our own country is occupying foreign lands, leaving destruction behind as rag-tag armies try to mobilize.
Watching "Come And See," you realize how American films have whitewashed war and violence to the point where audiences seeing a "war film" really just want to see carnage decorated with nationalism, consider the reviewers here who consider the film "boring" because Klimov actually makes an attempt to create characters, to capture faces and people living through tremendously agonizing moments. Just look at the faces, the close-ups, they have a haunting quality few films ever achieve. "Come And See" is violent, it is brutal, it is poetic and a masterpiece. If you care for a REAL exploration of war and it's effects, if you really want to see a work that transcends the typical genre of the "war movie," this is a must-see.
Movie Review: Come And See If You Dare
Summary: 5 Stars
*** This comment may contain spoilers ***
Historical note:
"The film concerns the Nazi policy of "total annihilation" in the republic of Byelorussia (now known as Belarus or White Russia, adjacent to Poland) in 1943. The racial policy of the Nazis was to eliminate all "inferior races" such as Jews and Slavs from Eastern Europe and to make land available for German settlement in the east (Lebensraum). Because of the importance of Eastern Europe to Nazi policy the bulk of the German Army was sent to the eastern rather than the western front. Estimated that 20 million or more Russians (by Russians I mean the people of many nationalities that included Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Jews and many others who used to live on the Soviet territories occupied by Germans during 1941-1943) died fighting Hitler (recent estimates place figure 25-30 million). Units of the SS (Schutzstaffel) and SD (Sicherheitsdienst) were used to carry out the genocide. The SD was separated from the main body of the German Army (Wehrmacht) and made up of fanatical Nazis and fascist East European (often from the Baltic) collaborators."
Elem Klimov's and Ales Adamovich's Film is perhaps one of the most powerful and horrifying films about the war (I would add Tarkovsky's "The Childhood of Ivan" aka "Ivanovo Detstvo" and Mikhail Romm's documentary "Obyknovenny Fascism" aka "Ordinary Fascism" aka "Triumph Over Violence").
Not for a moment would the film let the viewer relax. With each scene, the feeling of horror increases. We are transformed into the main character, 16 year old boy Florya. We are forced to see with his eyes, to hear with his ears. In the beginning of the film, Florya is a child. At the end, after having witnessed the unspeakable terrors of the fascists, he becomes an adult, and not just an adult - an old man. His face is the face of War - and it is to us, the viewers, authors say - come and look in this face if you dare.
War unmistakably selects as its victims the weakest, the youngest and the tenderest - the authors could not go against this truth. In the military camp, Florya meets the young girl, Glasha. Together, they try to make their way to the village where his family lived. But no one is there, it is empty - it is burnt out.
And again some force pushes Florya, Glasha and us to go further. But where? To the shed where the women and the children are burning alive? Into the hands of the rapists- fascists? Or to be photographed with the revolver put at your temple, surrounded by the laughing SS-men? Is there any way out of the Inferno of War?
The mystery of the final episode... Florya can not force himself to shoot the child at the photograph sitting at his mother's lap. Even if the child's name is Adolph Hitler. Florya puts his rifle down. The clear blue sky is above him. Sounds Mozart's "Requiem". What is this? Victory? Or defeat? Did Florya survive or did he perish like millions and millions during the endless days, months, and years of the worst war the humankind had known? Even if survived physically, he is a changed forever man, the man who looked triumphant death and horror in the eye for too long to ever forget them.
Movie Review: Unique, Surreal Film About a Different Kind of War - Not Propaganda
Summary: 5 Stars
I recently saw this movie, and was moved to comment about it after reading other reviews here on Amazon. Other reviewers here have commented that:
1) The surreal aspects of this film are a flaw or weak point.
2) The movie is about the horrors of war in general, not this particular war.
3) The movie is communist propaganda.
I disagree strongly with all three of these points.
1) The film *is* surreal, and that feature works perfectly to impart to the viewer a feeling of being dumped out of one world and into another that doesn't make sense - the exact feeling the 16 year old boy protagonist would feel when suddenly dropped into the hell of nazi occupation. I can't name another film that does so good a job of making the viewer feel like he or she is there, part of what is going on, seeing through the eyes and hearing through the ears of the protagonist.
2) This film is not about just any war. It's about the special nature of the war waged by nazis. There is no combat in this film - none - zero. This film never, ever shows the partisans fighting the nazis. It shows the nazis attacking unarmed civilians. Old and weak men, women, and children.
**** spoilers below ****
Then, in the aftermath of combat, when the partisans have captured a group of nazis, one of the ss officers explains in a calm voice the twisted logic of why they did it. It's all about exterminating an inferior race. "You don't have the right to be" he says, and "it all starts with the children". The nazis want to eliminate their enemy's ability to reproduce. Killing the women and children is not just a brutal act of passion, it's a strategic goal of the nazi war. The fighting between armies to gain control of territory and resources (what we usually see in a war movie) is only one half of the nazi war.
3) The movie is too thoughtful to be propaganda. Propaganda would tend to be a simplistic statement of "we're good, they're bad", but it's clear in this film that nazi ideology is being indicted, not the German people. In the ending montage that some have criticized, the boy is shooting at a picture of Hitler. It's clear he's blaming Hitler, not the Germans. With every shot he takes, time rolls back further, and further, undoing the things Hitler did. He rolls time all the way back to a picture of baby Hitler sitting on his mother's knee. Then, he stops. The camera shows a horrified look on the boy's face. He does not shoot the baby Hitler. This scene implies to me that the boy recognizes the potential for evil in all humans, including himself, and he fears that maybe the human creature itself is irredeemably flawed. I don't believe a propaganda film would leave such an open-to-interpretation ending, or an ending that didn't clearly place blame for everything on "the bad guys". I believe a propaganda film would have taken that last shot, wiping out Hitler at the root as if that answered all questions about everything that happened during World War 2.
Movie Review: A true image of WWII's Eastern Front.
Summary: 5 Stars
It can be said that when reality is adopted into cinema it loses its reality, and furthermore, since cinema is a form of art, human suffering, misery, anguish can be misinterpreted by those who have never experienced them before and turned into something "beautiful" (it is no wonder that self-pity and misery play a strong role in nationalist ideals). I found that Schindler's List made that very mistake. It turned a real human event into magnificent soundtracks and artistic representation. Human failure was transformed into hope. The vivid color patterns of reality (the color patterns that were seen even by the very Holocaust victims) were transformed into black and white. Thus art crossed the line by misrepresenting reality.
If that was the case with Schindler's List, then the opposite can be said of Come and See. It is absolutely horrific. There is no beauty in suffering here, only anger, misery, brutality and sheer lunacy. It portrays the darkest, most violent period of human history as nothing other than a horrific event that seems to bewilder the mind. How could man do such a thing to another? How can such hatred exist?
The Eastern Front of WWII cannot be understood or represented in any other way. It is a (real) human tragedy of unspeakable proportions. We who today live in an age where we can barely understand how this could happen, and as such lack the ability to truly empathize and conceptualize such suffering and death. Come and See invites us into a world we cannot begin to imagine even in our worst nightmares, and does it in the form of a psychological horror. After all, when we begin to understand the very idea of WWII we have to understand it from that very basis, as simply "horror".
It is fitting that "Requiem" is used in this film and the Apocalypse of John is cited. Nothing better encapsulates what this period of human history means. This movie is indeed a requiem to the lost youth of that period, the millions of young boys rushed to manhood and then death; millions of young girls rushed to the rape bed and then death. It is a requiem to lost innocence. The world of "Come and See" is indeed, as far as it can be understood by those who witnessed and suffered it, as hell and the end of the world.
WWII was not "heroism", it was not "glory", it was not the triumph of good versus evil since the movie shows that even those who were once "good" were transformed by their experiences and by the perpetrators into something different. These are all notions applied by a generation after the fact. In reality WWII was human failure at its worst, and this movie delivers just that.
The movie is a requiem to the destruction of a generation of mankind. Perhaps this and the Soviet film "Ballad of a Soldier" can help us give a face, a name, and a life to the millions upon millions of dead who, in their anonymous mass, we lack any connection to. It is an invitation in hell and the apocalypse.
Movie Review: Excellent account of WWII on the Eastern Front . . .
Summary: 5 Stars
4.5 StarsAlthough initially sceptical regarding this movie's historical accuracy as it was a Soviet era production, after watching it I thought this film to be a very honest and sobering portrayal of the war on the Eastern Front, between Hitler's Germany and the Soviet Union during WWII. The movie depicts an often overlooked facet of the war, specifically the activites of the SS "Einsatzgruppen," or special action police units, whose task was to liquidate Jews, communists, and any potential threats to the Nazi regime behind the front lines of the actual fighting. These SS police units travelled behind the army's advance, and in addition to conducting mass executions of Jews and suspected communists, were also employed to "pacify" occupied regions that were suspected of taking part in, or aiding, the growing underground resistance. The activites of such an SS unit provides the background to the movie as the main character, a young teenage boy, loses his parents and survives the razing of a Russian village - a scene quite unpleasant to watch, yet very well depicted and brutal in its realism. Of mention was the role played by local Russian militia in carrying out these executions and "reprisal" raids - as this is a Soviet film, and was subject to state oversight, I was surprised that such unpleasant reminders of Russian collaboration were incorporated. Large numbers of volunteers from the occupied territories were accomplices to the SS in their cleansing actions, a fact documented in this movie.
"Come and See" also provides an interesting glimpse into the role and activities of the Soviet partisans, the insurgent groups fighting the Nazi occupation behind the front. Furthermore, the suffering and harsh conditions endured by Russian civilians living under Nazi occupation is not lost upon the viewer. Although there are definitely stark Good vs. Evil undertones throughout the film (all Germans are essentially portrayed as cold, sadistic, Nazi killers - the Soviet partisans as heroic, beleaguered freedom-fighters), it must be remembered that this movie offers a mere snapshot of the war at its most horrifying level. SS actions such as the ones depicted were commonplace on the Eastern Front - as was the willing, and often enthusiastic participation of anti-Soviet / anti-Semitic elements in the USSR, whom the Nazis depended on for support.
Excellent camera work and photography, in my opinion the quality of filmmaking rivals the most recent Hollywood productions. This film is highly recommended to those interested in watching an accurate account of World War II in the eastern theater, and the war as experienced by the Soviet population.