Come and See
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Movie Reviews of Come and See
Movie Review: Surreal and Brutal!
Summary: 5 Stars
Elem Klimov's 1985 direction of a coming of age story for a simple Russian farm boy in Byelorussia in 1942. A modest production with very original direction carried by a good cast.
The setting of the story is during the German Russian offensive in Byeloussia in 1942. The Red Army was still on the verge of collapse and depended primarily on irregulars and resistance partisans in the occupied regions to foul up German logistics. As the Wermacht fought on the front lines, many SS Totenkopf units scoured the rural and urban regions carrying out Hitler's genocidal policies. As Nazi Germany saw no distinction between most Russians and Jews, countless Russian Jews, peasants, or others deemed undesirable were executed by these death squads to make way for colonization by German 'volk.' In this setting, the film presents the personal narrative of Florya, a Byelorussian adolescent boy 13-15 years of age. Living in a small village inhabited by peasants, he dreems of joining the partisans and so becoming a man. His parents discourage him from doing so but, after digging a rifle out of the dirt, he goes to enlist. He soon finds that the war is not a rite of passage but simply a cruel insanity that requires brutal survival and merciless revenge.
The production values are somewhat small in terms of equipment but this is not a combat-driven war film. There are several minor errors as to costumes and equipment also. The theme conveyed by this film is that there's no escape from war when you are surrounded by it. Elem Klimov conveys theses themes beautifully by reinforing them in various visual and auditory effects. The boy suffering of a concussion from a blast is cleverly incorporated into the sound and filming. There dronning sound and the shifting scenes convey well the concussion's effect on hearing, sight, and balance. This adds to the absurdist theme of the situation. The film appears in some places a lucid dream or a dark nightmare of the worse kind. The shortcomings in the film are minor if taken as whole although some of the scenes were too extended or repeated when the message they intended to convey was amply evident in a shorter time.
Alltogether a very original film by a talented director who uses surrealist imagery to convey a history that is all too real. It is both touching and disturbing. Seeing this film makes one understand why over 20 million Russians died during WWII. I definitely wouldn't recommend this film for children under 13.
Movie Review: Brutal and beautiful
Summary: 5 Stars
By the summer of 1942 the German army had been stopped before reaching Moscow, but it hadn't yet been destroyed at Stalingrad. German offensives in the southern part of the USSR still had a good chance of success against the Red Army, and Nazi death squads were hard at work in Byelorus and Ukraine, emptying villages in preparation for eventual German settlers.
Against this backdrop we meet Florya, a young boy, perhaps 14, from a Byelorussian village. He and a friend are digging where soldiers died fighting, looking for a weapon that Florya can use to join the partisans. He digs up a rifle, goes home to break his mother's heart and leave her with his two younger sisters, and marches off with the partisans with a grin plastered across his face.
The film follows Florya through some of the most brutal, horrific images I've ever seen on film. At one point, deafened by artillary explosions, he returns with a young woman to his village, finds the place emptied of people, buzzing with millions of flies, and with warm food still in his mother's oven. They eat, then he runs off to find the villagers, never seeing the bodies stacked like blown debris against the side of a barn. The young woman sees them and runs after him, almost incoherent with horror. Florya is eventually captured by the Nazis and survives to see Nazis captured by the partisans. The sadistic cruelty of the Nazis and the casual cruelty of the partisans are presented in stark, uncompromising scenes that stayed with me for days.
This movie is beautifully filmed. Even the most grotesque scenes are suffused with beautiful light, and at some points the nightmare takes on the quality of a dream. After Florya is deafened, the soundtrack is muted and overlaid with a piercing whine; it gives a sense of unreality to everything until sound returns to normal. The young actor who plays Florya does an excellent job, projecting pride and then despair with equal facility.
This movie is NOT for children. I've watched it several times, and every time it's left me feeling emotionally drained, almost abused. I can't imagine what kind of parents and director would let a kid act in a movie like that; I only hope he was much older than he looked. It's a grim look into a part of WWII that Americans rarely see, history that we often ignore. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in WWII and Soviet history, but not as a first movie for people interested in Russian and Soviet film.
Movie Review: raw power
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one of the most wild piece of film making you're likely to see on the subject of WWII. Imagine Schindlers List, Fellini's Roma and GUMMO, yes GUMMO tossed in a cinematic blender with David Lynch in command of the soundtrack. The film follows two traumatic life changing days in the life of a young boy eager to join the army and shoot some Nazis. Leaving his crying mother he quickly gets lost in the woods and a shell hits near him leaving him deaf cuing in a high pitched whine (voices are faint echoes) and some creepy ominous music that doesn't let up. From here on out the movie is one never ending nightmare of surreal imagery that is not for one second unbelievable. Paratroopers tangled in the tops of trees, women and children riddled with bullet holes stacked in a high neat pile like firewood, a Hitler scarecrow, the closeup eye of a dying cow, a barn packed full of people burning to the ground, Nazis drunk and having the time of their life raping and pillaging, the movie rarely lets up. There is one scene of sheer reckless endangerment as a heavy caliber machine gun fires real bullets across a field pumping bullets into a cow with an actor standing a couple of inches from the entry wounds!
Elem Klimov who lived in Russia during the war knowing this was his final cinematic statement has not made a traditional war movie, its an imprint of images that have long haunted his mind. A smiling Nazi looking back as a corpse lays on a motorcycle spinning in endless circles, an old woman laying on a bed in the smoldering ruins of a town, a pretty woman eating a lobster while slaughter goes on all around, and anything else I mentioned in this review. There are times remembering back on the film it feels as if you've stepped inside the skull of a ghost. There really is no other way to review this other than repeat what you saw, there was no other way to make a movie like this unless the director repeated what he has seen.
This really is one of the most criminally underrated war films of all time and was certainly ripped off/copied more than once. Luckily through word of mouth and a few write ups this movie has went from a small VHS run to two on DVD. It certainly deserves a place beside the other war classics, which are mostly artfully disguised action flicks. Give it a go and force everyone you know to watch it.
Movie Review: Brutally frank
Summary: 5 Stars
The first half of this movie is the most honest and realistic movie interpretation of the horrors of war i have ever seen. The poverty of the main protagonist and his small familly increases our awareness of their vulnerability and so heightens the horror when his familly are butchered. The sound effects are truly chilling, a rising insectile noise as the young man is confronted by the spectacle of horror gives the impression of growing insanity and pain beyond endurance. The director certainly got this all absolutely correct. Why have i spent so long describing this scene?
The scene accurately conveys the true horror of war, in which ordinary people are subjected to limitless cruelty and pain, so few movies actually do that (Hollywood almost never does it, Platoon and Casualties of War excepted), yet here we have a soviet era Russian movie that does. As we live in an age in which war atrocities become ever more mundane the importance of such art is clear. I approve of the mechanism the director uses which is to encourage us to empathise with a single human victim of the war to a high degree (instead of showing many victims treated shallowly).
The tension in the movie is extreme and the small respite provided through occasional dashes of humor (the Hitler head sculpture scene in particular) appear ghastly in places, someone here suggests that the movie becomes slightly 'biased' towards the end and i agree with them, there is a scene in which a nazi officer explains calmly (even as he is about to be immolated for his crimes) why he believes his extermination policies are correct as the Russians are sub-human which seemed just a little Hokey to me. Russian forces committed a good deal of atrocities during the war also, and the portrayal of them here is a little too meek. Surely the important point the director should have been trying to convey is that war brings out the savage in all regardless of uniform provided the circumstances are there to let the savage grow, instead of suggesting there was something uniquely inhumane about nazis or Germans. I approved of the ending of the film in which the boy is transformed by his experiences into a character burning with bottomless hate and rage.
Movie Review: DVD Technical Considerations
Summary: 5 Stars
Equally important to me in reading reviews about a film are the technical aspects/production values and quality of the DVD itself, particularly re-releases of older films. From what I've read about the overall DVD quality of "Come and See" there is controversy, to say the least.My intent here is to delineate the technical aspects of the current DVD issue and leave prophetic wisdom and insite of the film to other eager reviewers. But I will say that as a long-time war film fan I found "Come and See" easily one of the best with some of the most stunning visuals ever committed to film. If you've seen and appreciated such films as The Winter War, Das Boot, Stalingrad or Die Brucke (The Bridge) you should be quite pleased with this effort.
The current DVD package is no longer two DVDs, but one (thankfully) and contains all 142 uninterrupted minutes of the original film. The special features are scant and consist of a theatrical trailer with no oral commentary and a written appreciation of the film by Sean Penn.
The movie is full frame (aspect ratio 1.33:1) and NOT in original widescreen. It is in Russian with English subtitles giving the viewer adequate time to read each line. Each chapter is delineated on your DVD player, so you can stop anywhere you like and pick up where you left off later. I have a decent home theatre system and found the picture quality very good and likely similar to that which was released for theatres. The audio is in stereo and the sound quality is good and on a par for the era in which it was produced.
The DVD is still produced by Kino Video, issued in a hard case and contains the same art cover and interesting film descriptions as the former two DVD version.
In summation, a monumental motion picture (and a favorite of mine) and top quality production, not withstanding modest extra features.