What qualifies as a great movie? A romantic movie that tugs at your heartstrings, a thriller that constantly keeps you guessing, a horror movie that scares the bejesus out of you. Or the ones that can make you feel hopeless with an ending that fills you with despair. One such movie is the Russian classic Come and See.
Come and See is the account of a young boy, Florya, an inhabitant in the Russian state of Byelorussia (now Belarus) in the Soviet Union. Against his family’s wishes, Florya joins a group of partisans to fight against German forces who have invaded Byelorussia. This film spans over 3 to 4 days filled with horror, fear, and bravery and is regarded as one of the most authentic war movies ever made. I would not go as far as to say that it is not a horror film because of the cold, unadulterated truth about what most people had to go through during the Second World War.
Florya begins his expedition in the forests of Byelorussia. He’s given menial tasks to perform and is later left behind by the partisans, who now find him too young to go into war. Upset, he wanders around in the forest and meets a girl named Glasha. They are attacked by German paratroopers and rush for safety. Florya and Glasha plan to return to his village and reunite with his family but on reaching they find it burnt and stripped off any signs of life. Through the cinematography, the tension that the movie manages to create in this particular scene is breathtaking and alarming at the same time. The screenwriter’s show’s tiny details may seem fleeting at first sight but hold tremendous significance. An extremely haunting scene that stays with the viewer is when Floyra and Glasha are running through the village and see the dead villagers piled on top of each other, without clothes, like picking animals for slaughter.
A key element about this movie is that the actors regularly break the fourth wall. Breaking the fourth wall means that the actors start communicating with the audience to send out a message to the real world. They do this by staring straight into the camera and delivering a monologue. Breaking the fourth wall narrows your sense to a point and submerges you within the film. But in this movie, instead of just communicating, the audience feels as if they are in Florya’s position, going through all the horrors that he goes through. Elem Klimov (The director) also used live ammunition on set. This makes the reactions of the actors seem genuine. The fear on Florya's face when a gun is held to his head is completely authentic as it had live bullets in it. In one scene, a cow is slaughtered by machine guns while the actors are just a couple of feet away. This may seem like a questionable manner to direct the film, but it cannot be denied that the result has created some chilling moments. The actors staring into the camera is what nightmares are made of and even the daylight scenes give the feeling of inevitable trauma.
The subtle lines of reference that connect a few scenes in the movie are well portrayed. When Florya was about to go to war, he was baby-faced, ecstatic, and all ready to be of service to his country. After a few days, it seemed as if he had aged several decades and had the gaze of a battle-hardened veteran. We never learn about Glasha’s fate at the end of the movie. This is what makes this movie so utterly heartbreaking. It just wants to share the idea that there are no winners and only losers in a war. Only lives taken, families broken, and brutal crimes committed on innocent civilians.
In one instance, we see an entire history of the events that took place in WWII as Floyra shoots at a picture of Hitler repeatedly. But when we reach Hitlers' childhood, Florya stops shooting. He couldn't bring himself to kill baby Hitler. He starts crying in despair, conveying the idea that no one is evil from birth, this is something forced upon people by circumstances. As the movie comes to a close, we hear Mozart's classic, Lacrimosa. After everything that the viewer goes through, the brutality of war, full of static noise, the viewer is provided with something exact opposite, a delicate, complex piece of art in the form of Lacrimosa. Its tone is saddening and depressing, it's asking you to grieve and take in the events of the film which we have seen and which very much happened in real life.
This movie was Russia’s official entry in the Academy Awards. This is not surprising considering its brutally transparent portrait of war. Klimov never made another movie, citing that “he lost interest in the art of film-making”. This is not surprising considering what a bleak and disheartening experience it must have been to shoot such a timeless classic. Klimov also survived the Battle of Stalingrad as a young soldier. He channeled the emotions he experienced as an adolescent brilliantly and brutally. It is one of the strongest anti-war movies ever made and will stay with the viewers for a long time to come.
-Written by Shubhankar Mishra
Come and see (1985)
really fkn cool man!! keep up
Good one