by Joseph Davis, Contributing Writer
As I said this past June when writing about the film Battle for Sevastopol, if you tell me about a film with a historical setting, you’re going to have my attention. No other point in history draws me in quite like the Second World War. It just edges out the American Civil War in terms of events that had huge implications on world history and how we have learned or failed to learn from it. This is the mindset I was in while scrolling through YouTube when I found the channel Atun-Shei Films (by the way, a fantastic follow for anyone who is interested in history and historical fiction), whose video on his 10 most immersive historical movies is where I learned of the 1985 Soviet drama Come and See. Based on his description alone, I knew I needed to seek this film out and bring it to the light of day for this series.
Before diving into the film, much like every film for Out of Market, I decided to do some research first to see how it would fit into the criteria I have for myself in the Out of Market series. Just by looking at some of the promotional material, I can attest to you that this film is not for the faint of heart. The initial impression my research gave me brought to mind some of the poetry by soldiers, such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sasoon, who served in the British trenches of World War I. These war poets didn’t view war as a glorious time like their contemporaries, where you travel to defend the honor of your country and to seek glory, but instead, to quote Sassoon’s poem “Suicide in the Trenches” they viewed it as “the hell where youth and laughter go.”
The film follows a young Flyora (Aleskei Kravchenko) as he looks to join the war effort despite the warnings of his village and his mother, all the while as a German reconnaissance plane flies overhead. How he smiles and how he carries himself as he joins the local partisan resistance group brings to mind the opening of the above poem: “I knew a simple soldier boy/ Who grinned at life in empty joy,/ slept soundly through the lonesome dark/ and whistled early with the lark.” You can sense his awe and wonder after he joins them as they convene in camp, taking photos to show the glory and heroics that these partisans view themselves performing before leaning into more mundane tasks before most of the camp marches off to war. However, much like the poem I quoted, this image does not last long before it is completely and utterly shattered. From here on out, the idea of the glory of war is slowly and deliberately sucked from the film, much as the youth and innocence appears as if it is being sucked out of Flyora, as he transforms from a child looking for glory to someone haunted by the war. This film goes from something almost joyous, to haunting, to a downright harrowing experience.
The fact that this film is as haunting as it is is purely a testament to the camerawork and narrative by director and writer Elem Klimov. The way it is shot hammers the point of this movie home at every step of the way. It makes the events around Flyora all the more haunting, turning this film from a story of one person’s time in war into a psychological drama. He focuses both on the characters and on the bigger picture, with the ability to focus both on the characters and their background, the horrors of which clearly plays into each of their emotions. Klimov is able to take themes you see in the beginning of the film and, with a simple change in perspective, and in the actions of the characters performing them, turns them completely on their head from something that brings you a smile at the beginning to something leaving you trembling in fear at the end. I am in sheer and utter awe at this director’s ability to drive his message about the horrors of the Second World War home. This piece of art is nothing short of stunning, with a wretched beauty to it that I’d be hard pressed to find a better example. It both disorients you, yet makes your thinking clear.
Admittedly, I do have one criticism of this film. While I find its strong imagery necessary to drive home the point of this film, the fact that our main character and actor, who was sixteen when this film was released, and thus was barely in his teenage years when filming began, bothers me. Some of the scenes, some of the most horrifying to watch, strike me as if Aleksei isn’t acting, but reacting, as if he himself is on the verge of panic. The time period the film occurs in surely had a profound effect on the mental health of the survivors of the atrocities committed by the Nazis upon Eastern Europe, which is something the director himself clearly wants to show as a stance against war. It profoundly bothers me that you would take someone who has no defense mechanism against the horrors of war, and of what you are wanting to depict, and put him under a level of stress that few can endure. While it elevates the film and the narrative, this is something that you will never find me in support of.
Union General William Tecumseh Sherman once said, “War is Hell.” Benjamin Franklin ‘Hawkeye’ Pierce of the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital 4077 had a rebuttal: “War isn’t hell. War is war, and hell is hell, and of the two war is a lot worse.” Come and See very much fits the latter of these two phrases. This film is meant to warn of the horrors of war and the atrocities that can be wrought upon people when leaders determine that a group of people is not even worthy of existing. War may be a necessary evil at times, but when war is fought for an unjust cause and in unjust ways, it can leave atrocities in its wake. While the Soviet Union is just as guilty of atrocities as the Nazis are (a phrase that I’m sure will not come back to haunt me if I ever plan to visit Russia), this film deserves to be a beacon of warning as to just how low humanity can sink and the horrors that people can enact on others, and as a memorial to the victims of such atrocities, to say that we as a species must do better. This film is a brutal watch, but is also an experience that the world needs.
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